Best of breed lives: a remarkable story of growth and change

Software company start-ups, when they get to about $20 million to $30 million in revenues, often begin looking for a safe haven. That could mean an initial public offering—when those were all the rage—or being bought up by a larger concern with the resources needed to propel further growth.

OSIsoft and its PI System—for plant intelligence—practically founded the plant historian market, and forced automation software vendors like Intellution, Wonderware, and Rockwell to play catch-up. But when OSIsoft got to be about that prescribed size, Pat Kennedy, its founder, didn't worry about a safe haven. He waxed indignant.

After one well-known research analyst advised him it was time to sell, perhaps implying the entrepreneurial innovator needed to give up the driver's seat to a steady operations guy, Kennedy didn't make the same kind of mistake Steve Jobs did and later regretted, when he lost control of Apple to John Sculley.

As Kennedy said to one visitor at the time, "Who are they to tell me to sell my company?"

Therein lies a remarkable story, because not only, in the first place, did OSIsoft come out of seemingly nowhere with its historian solution to grow to $30 million, but it kept right on growing—over the last five years at better than 28 percent compounded annually—and is today a more than $80-million software company, with 270 employees and more than 10,000 installations of PI System.

"We saved $50 million over the course of our 10-year relationship with OSIsoft. The RtPM Platform and the PI System [comprise] one of the best investments we've made in our business," says Barry MacGregor, global business process manager, Dow Corning Corp. "What happens in the physical world impacts our business every day." (For more on Dow Corning, see page 25.)

Still, just because things are good is no reason to rest on your laurels.

The fact is PI has always been considered more of a tool set—with that term's implications of engineers immersed in the paraphernalia of it all—than a packaged solution.

Thus OSIsoft is in the midst of making profound changes to how its Microsoft-based technology and software applications are packaged and applied. Rather than be largely restricted to a production-related role in major process industries, the company hopes this repurposing will lead to uses on a wider—shall we say enterprise—scale.

To do that, OSIsoft has been rolling out its Real-time Performance Management (RtPM) solutions, which it says will allow better decision-making based on real-time access to both operational and corporate information. Wholesale changes to its sales and distribution model complete the transformation.

RtBaseline, introduced early this year and powered by the PI System, gathers relevant data from multiple sources across diverse computing and equipment platforms, delivering it in a specific context to role-based users. Also new, version 3.4 of PI constitutes a significant upgrade, and is integral to RtPM's role as an enterprise platform. It supports more than one million data points per PI server, more than 500 simultaneously connected users, and up to 80,000 events per second throughput for archive storage and retrieval.

"PI 3.4 is designed for the high reliability and massive scalability needs of the enterprise," says Michael Saucier, an OSIsoft VP. "It expands OSIsoft's leadership in developing data and events monitoring technology that caters to the operational complexities of global organizations."

Other elements of the RtPM platform include:

• RtPortal, which allows users to configure role-based portals for interaction with client tools. RtPortal is built around Microsoft's SharePoint portal technology.
• RtAnalytics, which performs high-level, automated analysis on a broad range of data.
• RtStudio, which provides an application-building environment that plugs into Microsoft Visual Studio.NET.

Concludes Saucier, "The complete RtPM Platform gives enterprise customers a solid foundation to develop a service-oriented architecture, uniform analytics, and visualizations for manufacturing intelligence."