The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is transforming the way the energy business is conducted by creating billions of data points that can be harnessed and turned into actionable intelligence for improving operations and efficiencies. There is no greater evidence of the importance of the IIoT than the innovations of two of the largest technology companies in the world: GE and Cisco. Both of these companies have been expanding the footprint of their IIoT technologies to help companies in industrial markets unlock the potential of their many connected devices, networks, sensors and systems. Recently, both GE and Cisco led a Series B investment round of $17.2 million in Bit Stew Systems to help expand its vision of Software Defined Operations throughout the utilities and oil and gas industries.
What is Software Defined Operation and why should energy companies care?
The number of monitoring and control points connecting industrial and commercial infrastructure to the “Internet of Things” is expected to reach at least 50 billion by 2020, generating almost $9 trillion in new revenue. It is hard to find a larger, faster growing market that is positioned to fundamentally transform how businesses operate – if businesses can manage all these connections effectively. Bit Stew’s “MIx Core” platform and “MIx Director” application provide the ability to harness all that connectivity by taking the massive volumes of data generated by these end points and turning it into actionable insights that can be used to improve operations.
For more than 10 years, Bit Stew’s technology has been proving its ability to help utility companies remove the complexity from the massive amounts of data generated by smart grids. Implemented at utilities such as PG&E and BC Hydro, the MIx Core platform integrates traditionally siloed and disparate data sources into a common data model, and the MIx Director application presents the information in a single, cohesive view, making it easy for operators and engineers to identify operational and process improvements and increase uptime.
Bit Stew’s technology enables operators and engineers to better monitor assets connected to the smart grid and environmental risks such as weather or wildfires that may impact asset performance. By providing this situational awareness in real-time, Bit Stew helps utilities prevent brownouts by ensuring grids maintain optimal performance while allowing operators to know when and where a customer needs service. In short, Bit Stew’s technology gives control and improved decision-making back to the operator, making it easier for them to do their jobs and meet customer demand.
By applying machine learning and predictive analytics to the data generated throughout industrial operations, Bit Stew’s technology enables companies to achieve what is known as Software Defined Operations (SDO). This can take many forms in the industrial enterprise but in essence it is a select number of parameters triggering a rule, which invokes a response based on specific processes. The more “rules” a company “teaches” its technology platform, the more sophisticated the Software Defined Operations become. With the software using rule-based analysis of events and responding automatically to certain triggers, human operators are no longer overwhelmed by numerous alerts and alarms from multiple systems and sensors. SDO automates manual workflows and inefficient models of the past so operators can better monitor, filter and manage alarms and alerts to determine the best course of action for a situation.
Software Defined Operations is also a game-changing innovation for oil and gas companies, positioning them for success in an increasingly competitive and data-driven market. Many oil and gas companies are struggling to extract meaningful intelligence from the tremendous volumes of raw data generated daily in their operations. Sensors on pumps, valves and pipelines measuring flow, temperature, pressure and density are creating a dramatic rise in data collection, causing upstream and midstream companies to feel like they’re drowning in data. By correlating all these data sources into a single model and providing situational awareness such as geospatial views of risks, operators can see visual confirmation of network chokepoints and gain early detection of anomalies across multiple systems in close to real-time. It also gives oil and gas companies the ability to better monitor asset performance and predict when an asset could fail, which can mean the difference between properly flowing production and an oil leak.
Franco Castaldini is VP of Marketing for Bit Stew.
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