Vladimir Raag
Country Manager Russia and CIS, OSIsoft Europe
What we are currently seeing in various industries, in particular in the field of software, is undoubtedly reminiscent of the infrastructure revolution in the IT industry itself in Russia in the early 2000s. That is not surprising; after all, businesses in the “real” sector of the economy inevitably adopt all the best that has been developed in IT sector. In addition, such trends have already been tried and tested in the West, where, frankly speaking, the development of IT is ahead of that in Russia.
So, what specific trends are we talking about? Let us look back to the 1980s, to a world in which mainframes were predominant. Programs or “applications” were written to perform a particular tasks. Such applications performed a whole range of data processing tasks: from data collection and interfacing with external devices to analysis and visualization. Today, such applications are called “vertical”, according to their position in IT architecture of enterprize. An application was written from scratch for each task, only the operating systems and, sometimes, the device drivers were standard. Development, debugging and implementation took considerable time and money. Gradually, various development frameworks, which were subsequently transformed into separate levels of the software, began to appear (e.g. RDBMS). However, “vertical” applications were fully split into separate levels with the appearance of “intermediate” software, or middleware. It was named in different ways for specific industries.
For example, by about the year 2000 Russian major telecom operators had already predominantly established their networks, having installed modern equipment. The software was either bought with the equipment, outsource or home-made developed or separate software suites were bought to monitor the systems and to meter the services provided. The operators bought equipment from various vendors and even those who were trying to create a unified network ended up with a mixed bag of equipment due to the acquisition of assets from other companies. The variety of equipment caused a serious headache with data integration needed for proper operation.
At that time system integration companies came onto the scene, offering a solution to these problems. They first used their own products to perform such task, but the complex nature of the task requires an industrial toolkit, which was already available in the foreign market. This is called “mediation”, which is often incorrectly translated into Russian as “pre-billing”, as it does not only transmit data to billing. Its functions are the collection, initial processing and transmission/presentation of data. Today, 10 years down the line, nobody in the telecoms industry needs to be convinced of the need for such systems.
A very similar process is now taking place in the field of industrial production. In the West it has already become an established fact. In Russia businesses are now replacing their obsolete Soviet-era hardware and software. They implemented various vendors’ low lever systems: PLC, SCADA, DCS, LIMS, etc. All these systems generate a large amount of real-time data which have to be collected, their integrity checked, reliably stored for long periods, analysed, transferred to other systems and visualized. This systems class includes: historic archives (real-time databases); interfaces with hardware and other systems; analysis and data presentation tools. We call this class a real-time system for production industries.
This data is used for various applications in industries, such as the monitoring and dispatch system, business analysis and reporting systems. Real-time systems allow a reduction of costs when building a unified data “bus”, integrating various items of hardware with one another, upgrading obsolete equipment/hardware as needed and binding new items seamlessly into the existing infrastructure. It can be said that a large-scale transition is taking place from “vertical” applications to the construction of a software infrastructure in industrial production.
So, what attributes must such software have to be a tool for the creation of world-class infrastructure?
» Adherence to standards
» Object model capable
» Extensible and flexible interfaces
» Expandability, configurability, openness
» Security
» Use both in IT systems and in automation systems
» Standard user interfaces
» Scalability, flexibility, accessibility
The independence of solutions is very important for achieving these features. Hardware/equipment manufacturers usually write software to fit their own existing solutions.
These systems lead to a reduction in capital and operating costs thanks to the re-use of tried and tested solutions on other hardware/equipment or in another field. This allows money to be spent more efficiently on end applications, without building a duplicate collection, storing and presentation systems. In the near future, the proportion of infrastructure solutions will seriously increase. It is an inevitable process, which is already taking place abroad.
