A 25th anniversary finds founder "feeling great"

OSIsoft is a $110 million-plus innovator celebrating its 25th year in business. It brought data historians into wide use in process industries, and its RtPM Platform brings technologies for data historians, portals, integration, and analytics to bear in pursuit of better, timelier decision-making.

Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy is president, CEO, and majority owner of OSIsoft. Looking back at 25 years of growth, Kennedy says, "It feels great. When you're young you don't always understand how you're building something. We spent the first five years of our existence explaining to people what we did and why they needed it. Today, there's much more understanding."

OSIsoft today feels itself being pulled in many different directions, but is determined to stick to its knitting. "There is today tremendous interest in real-time information, and we've been known for stable software since 1990. For those two reasons we're showing up in lots of different places. But in the main we're working with heavy, necessary things, and that's where we're most comfortable."

Cargill recently selected OSIsoft as the technology backbone for delivering real-time operational performance metrics within a common infrastructure across its global enterprise. "We continuously hear from our plant managers that PI [OSIsoft's data historian] enables more intelligent use of people's time and resources," says Ron Christenson, Cargill corporate VP and CTO.

OSIsoft has embarked upon an initiative, called Foundation, to reduce to a minimum the amount of programming involved in building an application, allowing users to do most of the work through configuration. The initiative's results will be released throughout 2006, with a "big release" in 2007—the goal being "simplicity, security, and availability."