• Designed to allow industrial companies to align OT data with enterprise data strategy and investments,  cloud-based analytics, and optimization
• Capable of same efficient administration, storage, and retrieval as on-prem deployments combined with reduced costs and maintenance of the cloud

SAN RAMON, Calif. – APRIL 21, 2022 --  GE Digital today announced the availability of the world’s first cloud-native operational data historian available in the AWS Marketplace, Proficy Historian for Cloud. This cloud-based industrial data management software is designed to facilitate a more simplified and  reliable movement of OT data to the cloud spanning from device level to enterprise. Proficy Historian for Cloud helps companies leverage existing IT cloud investments and combine OT and enterprise data. Proficy Historian for Cloud is now available in the AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Proficy Historian is a best-in-class historian software solution that is designed to collect industrial time-series and alarms and events (A&E) data at very high speed. It stores the data prioritizing efficiency and security, distributes it, and allows for fast retrieval and analysis —helping companies drive greater business value. With decades of experience and thousands of successful customer installations around the world, Proficy Historian changes the way companies perform and compete by making data available for asset and process performance analysis – at the equipment, line, plant, and enterprise levels.

This operational historian provides secure encrypted OT data streaming to the cloud designed to reach up to 150,000 values per second per interface and to provide store and forward capabilities to protect against data loss if the cloud or network is unavailable. Advanced compression combined with proprietary file-based storage makes it cost effective to use in a cloud infrastructure. Because it is designed for the cloud, Proficy Historian for Cloud provides the benefits of cloud-based technologies including zero downtime upgrades, data replication, and high availability.  Native interfaces to data lakes and other cloud-based analytics platforms combined with being deployed in the company’s virtual private cloud (VPC) enables more simplified data integration, shrinking time to value and reducing implementation costs.

Proficy Historian is designed to compress industrial data at the source reducing data transport, compute, and storage resources. Its design enables the ability for plant floor users to query data via tools like Excel and provide the ability to retrieve data from last month or 10 years ago at speed.  Operational historians help simplify the task of creating value on the plant floor by performing aggregations like returning the average value over a time period without building a complex query. They are designed to handle large volumes of streaming process/time series data and provide built in, reliable data collection tools designed for the industrial use case that includes hundreds of industrial protocols, store, and forward to handle network instability.

GE Aviation uses Proficy Historian to manage OT data in 32 manufacturing plants. “Managing this amount of data is costly,” said Bill Andrews, Technical Product Manager, GE Aviation. “By moving from 32 distinct deployments to a single deployment of Proficy Historian on AWS, we can dramatically reduce management costs and downtime while improving value, scalability, and reliability.”

The company expects to reduce infrastructure costs by more than 20% and annual resources by $185K. The team will also improve system availability by eliminating more than a month of planned downtime and enabling a common data store accessible by thousands of enterprise-wide employees.

“Leading industrial companies have made the decision to embrace the cloud,” said Richard Kenedi, General Manager of GE Digital’s Manufacturing and Digital Plant business.  “ERPs, data lakes, analytics toolsets, and even MES solutions are being deployed in the cloud.  What’s been missing is the ability to move OT data to the cloud at scale at an affordable cost.  Without the ability to consolidate transactional data with OT/process data the insights possible are limited. The potential remains unrealized because the technology that combines the capabilities of an operational historian with cloud-native deployment hasn’t existed – until now.”

“Industrial customers are asking us for innovative solutions to improve asset reliability, gain deeper insights from operational data, and scale securely across industrial plants,” said Stephen Orban, Vice President, AWS Marketplace, and Control Services at AWS. “That’s why we’re so excited GE Digital’s Proficy Historian is now available on AWS Marketplace. Whether deployed for a single plant or for a fleet of plants, this solution makes it easier for customers to send high volume operational data to a data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to run big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) at scale."