Maximize your impact: Eight key CONNECT updates from 2025

The unification of information (IT) and operational technology (OT) data promises a revolution in efficiency and innovation. CONNECT customers can now achieve this vision by seamlessly integrating their OT data directly into Databricks, creating a single, accessible, and cohesive data foundation. This breakthrough allows businesses to fully harness data science, AI, and machine learning to drive unprecedented efficiency, sustainability, and growth. The direct integration of CONNECT and Databricks delivers distinct advantages over in-house solutions with custom developments.

Beyond OT and IT, the third aspect of industrial data convergence is engineering technology (ET). CONNECT visualization now supports AVEVA™ Asset Information Management information as content, enhancing visualizations with interactive engineering data to improve decision-making. Visually combine and natively interact with 3D models, P&IDs, drawings, and real-time data all in a single view for an improved 360° view of your asset.

Now available in AVEVA™ Advanced Analytics, Perfect Centerline helps operations teams consistently achieve optimal performance. The solution uses centerline models to define the ideal operating conditions for each product and production line, automatically setting targets and limits for critical process variables. It goes a step further with multi-objective optimization, balancing key performance goals such as yield, quality, and energy use at the same time. 

To meet the need for advanced visualizations, we created Experiences in CONNECT. This new interactive tool enables you to visualize dynamic content, advanced visualization functions, and deep customization. These structured views give you the flexibility you need to design the visualizations you want, including layout, size, aspect ratio, colors, navigation and menu interactions, and content mix, among other options, all while converging IT/OT/ET into a single enterprise view.

A revised and enhanced library of preset graphics was released earlier this year for designing visualizations and Experiences. These graphics offer greater customizability and consistency, and can be used to represent industrial equipment, KPI displays, or other visuals. You can modify graphic options and custom properties to align with your specific use case, accelerating visualization creation while maintaining visual consistency.

This set of features specifies an asset to dynamically drive the data values shown within visualization content. For example, select “GE 01” to see all trends, charts, maps, and tables relevant to “Asset 1.” Then select “GE 02” and all of those same elements change to reflect information relevant to “Asset 2.” This greatly reduces the time and effort involved in creating visualizations for asset types you have many of, since you only need to build the visualization once.

CONNECT’s Industrial AI Assistant is a generative AI tool you can use alongside CONNECT data and applications. It is now available to all CONNECT visualization users in an open preview. With Industrial AI Assistant, you can ask industrial-specific questions using natural language chat interface. Industrial AI Assistant will then quickly find and summarize the information you need.