#SoftwareRevolution: Industrial cloud historian for big data

Wonderware Historian and Smart Glance software may be viewed during Invensys’ 2013 Software Conference and Tech Support Symposium in Texas (USA).

Invensys has released a new, cloud-hosted Wonderware^® Historian Online Edition that will enable customers to safely share more plant data with their workers while lowering their IT burden. Building on a base of more than 70,000 Wonderware Historian licenses, the company’s new Historian Online Edition offering can help reduce implementation time, provides universal access and delivers alternative pricing models for expanded industry use.

This innovative, Software as a Service offering uses a multi-tier Historian database architecture, storing data from one or more local plant-level Wonderware Historians onto a cloud-hosted, enterprise-wide instance. Data flows only one way—from the local historians to the online historian—and it is protected from cyber intrusion so it can safely be made available to more workers for better troubleshooting, reporting and analytics. The solution leverages Windows Azure cloud services from Microsoft Corp., so there is no software to install or set up, saving on valuable IT resources and reducing capital requirements.

“Our new Wonderware Historian Online Edition is a revolutionary way of accessing and using real-time data on demand,” said Rob McGreevy, vice president, information, asset and operations software for Invensys. “Providing a hosted historian simplifies set-up, installation and ongoing maintenance, and also improves usability for the end users by safely and securely making the information available wherever and whenever needed. Users can scale as their needs grow, without having to worry about infrastructure, hardware or software costs, upgrades or support.”

This service will be offered as a yearly subscription, based on the number of users accessing the data.

Reporting and analytics are delivered to the historian online edition through standard tools, including Invensys’ desktop reporting and analysis client, Wonderware Historian Client, along with its Wonderware SmartGlance^® mobile reporting solution. System users can view the data via multiple devices, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and smart phones.

The Wonderware Historian Online Edition is the first commercial offering from the Invensys-Windows Azure relationship, whereby the two companies jointly develop manufacturing operations software that can be hosted on the Windows Azure platform.

 “Windows Azure is a scalable, flexible cloud platform, and Invensys’ introduction of its Wonderware Historian Online Edition on Windows Azure demonstrates the value industrial firms can gain from using a platform that removes the burden of requiring expensive IT infrastructure to bring new products quickly online,” said Dewey Forrester, senior director, business development and evangelism at Microsoft.