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Let’s begin with a glimpse of your company’s presence and offerings in India?
We work with a wide variety of Indian and multinational companies to address their requirement of a Real Time Data Infrastructure. We are used in power generation companies (both thermal and renewable) NTPC uses PI system for central monitoring of data at headquarters, Delhi from 29 generation plants, Tata Power Mumbai has created central data infrastructure for all their digital transformation strategies. NTPC and Tata Power have explained the centralisation of data with proper contextualisation has helped them to improve the Asset Health & Situational Awareness. Adani Ports, for instance, uses our PI System to give it visibility into its operations so that it can maximize crane utilization and other tasks. Adani explained that it achieved a payback in two years by using the software to optimize tug boat operations. Another big focus for us are utilities and renewable energy. Worldwide, we work with over 1,000 grid operators and utilities. The intermittent nature of wind and solar remain a challenge: with software like ours, utilities get greater visibility into anticipated power production, which makes it easier for them to sell excess wind power or when to buy power from other sources. Software is going to make the grid far more efficient and allow it to extend to communities that haven’t had easy access to it.
What have been some of the recent developments at your organisation?
One of the biggest changes for us has been the expansion of the partnership program. OSIsoft essentially produces technology for industrial customers: oil producers, utilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers, railroads. These are conservative organizations and rightly so. Thus, we’ve kept our product line stable. But, to expand our on capabilities and give customers more options we’ve been teaming up with companies like Dell, HP, Spark Cognition, PWC, Wipro, Emerson and others.
Tell us a bit about the recent technology advancements in your sector?
The Industrial Internet of Things is one of the largest economic opportunities on the plant. McKinsey, among others, expect that IIoT technology will add trillions to the world economy by reducing resource consumption, improving safety or increasing productivity at existing facilities by using data to fine-tune operations. Industry consumes 54% of energy worldwide: a 1% reduction at a mine or a metals processing plant can mean millions of savings a year with comparatively little upfront investment. OSIsoft specializes in software that effectively lets people capture and organize this data so that they can use it to improve their businesses. We’ve been in this market for 38 years. Thus, a lot of what people see as “new” technology is merely older technology that is getting attention. That said, we are also seeing the emergence of cloud-based analytics that will supplement these existing systems. With our PI System, for instance, utilities can predict certain types of failures a week to two weeks in advance, cutting repair costs by 90%. But by combining the PI System with new types of analytics, you can predict a new categories of problems even further out.
What are your growth plans for the Indian market? What are the milestones you wish to achieve by the end of this fiscal?
We tend to manage for the decade, not the quarter. As a result, our goals are really more long term goals. So what are those? We see India as a vibrant industrial economy that will be supplemented and modernized over the next several years through more software, analytics and communications. We will play a large part in that. We will be building out a Tier 1 and Tier 2 system integrators with industry knowledge and along with our own outreach to customers.
What have been the latest trends in demand for your products & services in India? Where do you see the next demand growth coming from?
It’s very similar to what we see in other Asian economies. Over the next ten years there will be increased focus on renewables, energy storage and smart grids. India wants to expand power access and reduce reliance on diesel generators. Manufacturers also want to modernize. To complete globally, these companies will have to streamline supply chains and reduce resource consumption. The market won’t grow as fast as consumer services—the customers must be more circumspect—but it will grow steadily.
Anything else you would like to add for our readers.
OSIsoft has a large and growing market share in the renewable energy industry. Sixty wind energy companies in 23 countries use the PI System at over 1,100 sites. Some of the top wind energy producers in the world, including Dong Energy, EDP Renewables, E.ON, and Iberdrola, are OSIsoft customers. Our product’s combination of superior data access, mobile data capture, analytics, web-based visualization, and data management capabilities gives wind energy companies a highly flexible and open environment to address specific requirements and objectives. The platform is a rapid development environment for the build-out of complex applications for new ideas, and it enables business users to build ‘self-service ’ advanced operational analytics.
