Posted: August 24 2026
As operational data initiatives grow, so does the need to expand who can participate in connecting, configuring, and managing industrial data.
In my role at AVEVA, I frequently hear from customers, partners, and AVEVA™ PI System™ administrators who have spent decades turning operational data into business value. Recently, many of them have been saying the same thing: The group of people with a stake in configuring, managing, and scaling data connectivity has widened alongside expanding industrial data strategies.
Operations teams, system integrators, and digital transformation leaders all have a stake in connected data, and, naturally, many share the same question: How can we make industrial data connectivity accessible to a broader range of users, while maintaining the flexibility and scalability they expect from operational data infrastructure?
What’s driving the need for more accessible industrial data connectivity?
Most organizations want to expand access to operational data. They want to connect more assets. They want to onboard new sites, new edge deployments.
They want to modernize how data moves between operations and analytics, engineering, and business systems.
As industrial data initiatives expand with IIoT and digital twins, organizations need repeatable ways to connect more assets, sites, and systems. This shift is occurring against a backdrop of ongoing workforce and skills challenges. Deloitte reports that talent remains one of the top concerns for manufacturers as organizations continue investing in digital and data foundations to support growth and innovation. Success increasingly depends on providing experiences that support both veteran practitioners and newer users while maintaining consistency across deployments.
This need is reflected in the feedback we've heard from AVEVA Adapter users over time. While many IT-centric users enjoyed configuring AVEVA Adapters repeatedly with PowerShell or via their favorite REST client, many others in operations wanted a more intuitive experience. Requests included easier ways to add and manage large numbers of tags, guided setup experiences that reduce configuration effort, and graphical interfaces that complement existing programmatic workflows. What we’ve heard from customers reinforced what we’re seeing across the industry:
Organizations want to scale operational data initiatives while making it easier for more people to participate in them.
What if more people could successfully configure industrial data?
I think that's the more important question.
This challenge extends beyond technology. Recent manufacturing workforce research suggests the industry could face significant talent shortages in the coming decade while digital skills requirements continue to rise, making it increasingly important to enable more users to participate in industrial data initiatives. It’s not simply how we connect more assets, but how we scale across teams and locations.
Operations engineers, plant personnel, system integrators, and administrators all understand the business value of connected data. The challenge is scaling initiatives while maintaining the flexibility, consistency, and control required by advanced industrial environments.
A more approachable way to configure AVEVA Adapters
This is why I'm excited about the new AVEVA Adapter Configuration Utility.
"Our goal was to provide an easy-to-use, web-based experience that reduces the time to deploy and the learning curve for configuring AVEVA Adapters while maintaining the flexibility customers expect."
— Jonathan Pegg, Product Manager, AVEVA
Complementing existing headless and programmatic configuration options—like JSON editing and Command-Line Interface (CLI) workflows commonly used for automation, silent installations, and large-scale deployments—the utility provides an intuitive browser-based experience for configuring and managing AVEVA Adapters that send critical data to AVEVA PI Data Infrastructure and CONNECT.
The result? A configuration experience that helps organizations onboard users into the process, standardize deployments, and scale operational data connectivity more efficiently.
Several capabilities stand out:
- A guided Quick Start experience helps users create working AVEVA Adapter configurations quickly
- Interactive discovery helps identify available data items on the data source
- Import and export capabilities support repeatable deployments across multiple sites
- A schema-driven design automatically adapts to supported AVEVA Adapter types
For organizations looking to expand operational data connectivity, these capabilities can help remove friction from the configuration process while expanding participation.
Making connectivity collaborative
The future of industrial data connectivity isn't just about connecting more systems.
It's about helping organizations connect those systems more consistently, more efficiently, and across more teams.
When more people can contribute to data connectivity initiatives, organizations can accelerate onboarding, standardize configurations, and scale operational data strategies with greater confidence.
Organizations can scale involvement in industrial data connectivity by providing more accessible configuration experiences. See how AVEVA Adapter Configuration Utility helps achieve that goal in the recent AVEVA World demonstration. Watch the demo to see the utility in action.
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