AVEVA™ Data Hub and the move to the cloud: Why and why now

Posted: September 6, 2021 

What if you could unlock more insights from your critical operations data to drive meaningful change? What if you could combine raw data streams with related contextual information, deliver it in real-time to more team members, share it with trusted partners, and easily deliver it in the right format to advanced analysis tools? AVEVA Data Hub lets you do all that by centralizing your operations data and giving users the access they need to make smarter, data-driven decisions. AVEVA Data Hub is our cloud-native data management service, built on Microsoft Azure, for real-time operations data management, secure data sharing, and analysis. This is your easiest on-ramp to the cloud. Read on to learn more about how AVEVA Data Hub works and what it could help your organization achieve.

What inspired the creation of AVEVA Data Hub?

"A lot of our customers have been pushing the boundaries of what they do with their data," says Elizabeth McErlean, Senior Strategic Product Manager at AVEVA, “so we wanted to make sure that customers could get their data as easily as possible, no matter where they are.”

There's a strong push at the executive level to increase agility and reduce costs by adopting cloud best practices within OT, and IT plays an important role in any cloud strategy. Executive leadership has been driving digital transformation on the business side for some time. Now, OT and IT teams are begging to collaborate and lead these efforts jointly. AVEVA Data Hub makes cloud adoption easy for users while leveraging existing PI System investments, so they can see results quickly without having to build a new cloud-based solution from the ground up. With AVEVA Data Hub, there’s nothing to architect or maintain.

How does AVEVA Data Hub work with AVEVA™ PI System™ and AVEVA Edge Data Store?

AVEVA Data Hub complements on-premises deployments of AVEVA PI System and remote devices, such as with AVEVA Edge Data Store, as well as supporting IIoT-based sensors. Once users gather all this data, they can then make it available to others to fuel new industrial use-cases across new user personas. Additionally, those who have on-premises PI Systems can use AVEVA Data Hub to securely share real-time information inside and outside of their organization. No more login sharing or provisioning contractor laptops—AVEVA Data Hub allows authorized users to access data with just a web browser, regardless of their location. This also means that data scientists, who require rich, contextualized data, can pull what they need from AVEVA Data Hub without requiring AVEVA PI System installed on their side.

What are some of the key features of AVEVA Data Hub?

One of the most popular features of AVEVA Data Hub is visual trending, which allows users to quickly select one or many data streams, trend them, and subsequently share this information with others for real-time collaboration. Visual trending is key for improving remote monitoring and situational awareness. It provides the ability to view, collaborate with, and analyze your data, wherever you are.

Data storage is another key feature of AVEVA Data Hub. Everybody needs data storage for their system of record. With AVEVA Data Hub, you are not limited to time-series data. You can have any series or multiple series (time, location, depth) for maximum flexibility. AVEVA Data Hub is a data collection, management, storage, and integration service combined.

And, unlike on-premise systems, AVEVA Data Hub does not need to be maintained by the customer. There is nothing to build or update, which equates to faster ROI. Updates are pushed automatically to the cloud and require no work at all on the customer’s part.

How are customers using AVEVA Data Hub?

AVEVA Data Hub is an ideal bridge between IT and OT teams, and provides immediate access to high-fidelity, contextualized operations data. Use-cases vary from secure data sharing, remote monitoring, data aggregation, and data science enablement to help accelerate predictive modeling efforts, for example. By aggregating data from multiple AVEVA PI Systems into one centralized cloud location, AVEVA Data Hub can help you gain newfound visibility across your plant, while also enabling data science. AVEVA Data Hub also enables industrial services and connected ecosystems. Instead of emailing spreadsheets or sending personnel onsite to collect data, industrial service providers can use AVEVA Data Hub to quickly gather reliable, real-time and historical operations data from their industrial clients, remotely. Whether it’s data sharing or remote monitoring, the goal is to make it easy, secure, and fast. A robust, ready-to-use, cloud-native data management solution with these capabilities opens doors for customers. Extensible API support also adds to the value.

In practice, AVEVA Data Hub has been used in a wide range of activities, from preventing harmful algal blooms to improving maintenance spending.

What's next for AVEVA Data Hub?

AVEVA Data Hub’s development is agile and iterative. Improvements are constantly being pushed out to customers without them lifting a finger. Recent updates include the addition of assets and Asset Explorer, and now Microsoft Power BI integration. These updates represent exciting new capabilities for users to group and contextualize their data streams and share and create reports as needed using off-the-shelf tools.

Deploying AVEVA Data Hub today is an investment in the future of your organization. As the system continues to expand and grow, customers gain improved features and capabilities that are purpose-built for OT, yet can adapt to existing IT cloud architectures.

Learn more about AVEVA Data Hub and what it can do for you.