ISA Expo features portals, real-time analytics
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 7:00:00 AM
ISA Expo—a trade event that showcases industrial automation systems—had some of its key developments on the software front this year in Houston. Among the highlights: portal technology for plant intelligence.
Several announcements revolved around the use of platform technology from Microsoft Corp. Not only did Microsoft report a partnership with plant automation vendor Invensys (see page 7) at an ISA press conference, it also used that same stage to discuss its work with OSIsoft, a vendor of real-time performance management software, to deliver an OSIsoft portal.
The package—dubbed OSIsoft Rt Portal—is based on Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. David Smith, market mentor at OSIsoft, says the portal provides Microsoft Office System (SharePoint Portal is a feature of Office Professional) users with functionality for "performance-driven intelligence."
Smith says OSIsoft offers the various layers of a plant intelligence solution, including the data repository, the analytics, and portal functionality. Says Smith, "We're partnering with Microsoft to offer some of the core portal functionality, rather than trying to develop that ourselves."
OSIsoft's analytics and data management capabilities allow manufacturers to establish a "baseline" for plant intelligence that "allows them to get a single version of the truth," says Smith, and can include real-time data on plant conditions.
Also talking up a portal was industrial automation software vendor ICONICS. The company introduced PortalWorX, which also works with SharePoint Server. Says Tim Donaldson, product marketing manager for ICONICS, "A key thing we built into PortalWorX is ease of use. We wanted to make it easy for managers to set up custom portals and dashboards."
Another vendor involved in the plant intelligence software trend is Citect. MSI met with Darren Trumeter, president of Citect Americas, and Peter Long, general manager of applications engineering.
Citect calls the plant intelligence trend Industrial Information Management, or IIM, says Trumeter, adding that success of IIM ties back to the "richness of the tools" at the various levels. Long says Citect offers an IIM framework that includes portal, online analytical processing, and data aggregation capabilities, on top of which analysis modules are deployed.
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