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Contributed on August 29, 2016

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The TIBCO Insight Platform—Data and Systems Integration for Industrial Internet Applications in the Energy Sector  

Blog: The Tibco Blog

In a prior blog, I described how successful energy companies are increasing their focus on analytics and technology to run profitable businesses, in these times of high crude supply and lower margins. Innovative companies are driving business operations from analytic insights to address business challenges like where to drill, what rigs to operate, which assets to acquire or divest, and how to run the business to optimize production, sales, marketing, and profit. In this article, I focus on data and systems integration—surfacing and wrangling data for analytics insights and business optimization.

TIBCO data integration 

Consider production optimization as a use case. With careful interconnection of systems and application of analytics, a production manager can be physically sitting in Houston, monitoring thousands of wells around the world from close-to-real-time feeds of equipment sensor data.

This industrial equipment, condition-based maintenance scenario requires multiple levels of data integration—historical data and real-time data streams.

TIBCO Spotfire has connectors for many energy sector data sources; and rich, inbuilt functionality for wrangling data across multiple sources. These capabilities are described on the TIBCO Community site, including downloads and documentation for connectors and drivers.

In the energy sector, sources such as OSIsoft PI System and SAP-HANA are used in some important specialized areas. TIBCO Spotfire and TIBCO Streambase have OSI connectors and can readily access data from PI, PI AF, PI Event Frames and the PI Integrator for BI. TIBCO Streambase can also write data to PI; allowing cleaned data to be consumed by other applications. TIBCO Business Works can integrate data from OSI PI with other streams of data. Some key capabilities of the Spotfire and Streambase PI integration include:

• Reading PI tag data and metadata
• Reading AF data, metadata and structure
• Reading event frame data
• Writing PI tag data and metadata
• Performing streaming analytics on PI tag data
• Creating interactive analytics applications using Spotfire data functions
• Performing statistical processing using Spotfire and TERR/R

Spotfire is certified on SAP HANA and some newer features include:

• Variables and input parameters defined in SAP HANA can be handled in Spotfire using prompts
  • Saves time and enables this business logic to be used from within Spotfire analysis files
• SAP HANA information views hierarchies automatically replicated to Spotfire
• SAP HANA text joins are supported
  • Enables selection of the language your data are represented
  • Enables localized Spotfire analyses towards multi language SAP HANA instances
• SAP HANA column descriptions can be visualized in information views
• SAP HANA attribute views supported
• SAP HANA metadata are loaded on-demand to speed up the definition of Spotfire views
• By defining the key column in Spotfire, marking in visualizations is enabled even when no primary key column is defined in SAP HANA

Some other energy data sources are highly specialized and not simple to access or integrate. For industrial Internet (IIoT) applications, integration of real-time data streams is needed.

TIBCO OpenSpirit is software purpose-built for the energy industry to tackle data integration, preparation, and analysis of energy data, including data connectors for specialized energy data sources like Petra, Kingdom, and OpenWorks.

OpenSpirit layers into TIBCO’s infrastructure and integration products—these products combine best-in-class messaging capabilities with the ability to integrate, orchestrate, and expose (via APIs) numerous applications and technologies in private, hybrid, and cloud environments.

TIBCO messaging products like TIBCO EMS and TIBCO FTL form the basis of high-speed, low-latency communications transports, while TIBCO BusinessWorks (BW) allows organizations to build a service layer based on architecture approaches such as microservices.  With BusinessWorks, companies have the ability to integrate various technologies: REST/JSON, SOAP, JMS, HTTP, JDBC, etc. and applications such as Oracle, SAP, OSI, IBM, MSFT, Hadoop.  BW’s zero-code visual integration flows greatly reduce the effort required to build and expose integration services, and it offers strong capabilities in the areas of real-time data preparation and transformation.

Using TIBCO’s messaging capabilities, TIBCO BW, and TIBCO Open Spirit, it is simple to define integration flows that process data from any source, orchestrate service calls, expose API-based functions, and run within a fully managed environment.

TIBCO’s integration products also include Business Process Management with TIBCO Active Matrix BPM and master data management with TIBCO MDM. These products are used in concert with the rest of the TIBCO stack for these functions. Applications in the Energy Sector include predictive maintenance (PdM) of equipment and assets, sometimes including data such as IBM Maximo or SAP Plant Maintenance. Spotfire visualization on top of the BPM database provides data discovery and analytics consistency across the mapped processes.

TIBCO is adding new products to this stack including Project Flogo and the TIBCO Graph Database. Flogo enables IoT edge application development with a lightweight, zero-code environment for building and deploying integration and data processing directly on connected devices. TIBCO Graph Database models data as graphs with nodes and edges, and delivers linear performance at scale, providing solutions for vector data such as wells and other multi-node asset types.

The TIBCO Insight Platform and the Industrial Internet (IIoT)

Based on equipment sensor data stored in historian systems and integrated with advanced analytics tools, engineering managers are able to visualize patterns and leading indicators for equipment stoppages that the analytics team has developed. The analytics patterns can be simple rules like changes in pump intake pressure, or more flexible empirical models; forming leading indicators to failure conditions such as gas build up in the downhole, plugged tubing, and the like.

These patterns can then be used to monitor refreshed equipment sensor data in real time to anticipate when and why a potential equipment-issue may arise. Potential issues can be communicated to responsible engineers for intervention, and managed in a collection of accumulated intelligence on the equipment for convenient on-going assessment, maintenance, and production optimization.

TIBCO Streambase, Business Works, and Open Spirit enable real-time data preparation and transformation for all required data sources. This may include well status, pump and controller status, downtime codes, shutdown reasons, equipment components, manufacturers, operations data—in addition to the sensor data from the pumps over time.

Using TIBCO’s messaging capabilities, TIBCO BW, and TIBCO Open Spirit, it is simple to define integration flows that process data from any source, orchestrate service calls, expose API-based functions, and run within a fully managed environment.

This TIBCO Insight Platform also enables a broad set of outputs including notifications and alerts, social collaboration and crowdsourcing, and entries into Business Process Management systems and data stores for ongoing equipment management and production optimization in real time. The platform also builds institutional knowledge, identifying the kind of equipment components with issues, regions impacted by those issues, and any consistent bad actors in the system. This Enterprise Platform forms a digital nervous system across the field equipment, technical and management staff, providing notifications and alerts to the appropriate engineers who can take action to keep the oil and gas production flowing.

This is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in action, and TIBCO supports this batch to real-time analytics scenario at scale.

TIBCO’s Houston Energy Forum 

The TIBCO Houston Energy Forum brings together hundreds of data management and analytics professionals in the Energy Sector for two days of technology innovation and sharing. Themes for 2016 include operational excellence, strategy, and technology—with presenters from leading energy companies across the country.

The latest and greatest updates from TIBCO Spotfire, Streambase and Open Spirit are featured on the program, including new geoanalytics, graphics, data discovery, and predictive analytics features, templates, and data functions. Day one features customer and TIBCO technical presentations, and day two includes training and a Hackathon for Spotfire users. Some technical material is being published to the TIBCO Community for use in the Hackathon and to extend the reach of the forum. Find this material below:

TIBCO Community – Energy
TIBCO Community – Spotfire Community WIki
TIBCO Community – Exchange

In these times of low margins, innovative companies are accelerating their digital journey. From upstream exploration and production, to refining and logistics, downstream fuels, and marketing, there are opportunities for optimization. Innovative companies are using analytics to prioritize asset portfolios, maximize production, address environmental health and safety, manage equipment, and streamline logistics, sales, and marketing. It’s the surest path to competitive technical and business process, operations, and profit in the current environment. Join us for the Energy Forum next month to dig deeper.