Aveva World Conference 2024: Designing for a Connected Industrial Economy

Attendees to Aveva World 2024 came away with a definitive message: Drive digital transformation and sustainability throughout the lifecycle of industrial assets.

Supporting a drive for partnerships and collaboration is a cornerstone in the company’s portfolio-wide transition to a subscription-based business model, which leverages cloud, hybrid and on-premises solutions across the design-operate-optimize industrial lifecycle, said Aveva CEO Caspar Herzberg, who announced portfolio updates to 3,500 delegates who attended this year’s conference in Paris (Oct. 14-17).

The traditional approach to securing customers by developing software specifically for industry has been surpassed by the call for open software, argued Herzberg. “Traditionally, most industrial software was developed specifically for industry with the idea that one basically could replicate it so many times and then lock the entire industry into your software,” he said. He added that the promise of AI and digitization has paved the way for working with open-source software and open data.

The industrial world will create more than 175 zettabytes of data by 2025, noted Aveva CEO, Caspar Herzberg during a keynote address at Aveva World 2024 in Paris.

Without it, the promise of using AI and making a plethora of case studies work at scale won’t work, pointed out Herzberg.

This perspective may seem counterintuitive because most companies prefer not to share information with rivals. For Herzberg, the benefits of doing so outweigh both the challenges of competitiveness and the fear of negative repercussions.

Digital Transformation Requires Radical Collaboration

In a one-on-one interview, Robert McGreevy, chief product officer, Aveva, elaborated on Herzberg’s talking points about developing a partnership ecosystem. “Radical collaboration is about engaging the community at large industrial manufacturing with critical infrastructure to help solve these enormous problems we’re all facing,” McGreevy said. “The energy transition, the increasing demand for power, the need to manufacture goods at a rapid pace, distribute those in an interesting and sustainable way...the entire value chain of producing finished goods and manufacturing things requires this idea of radical collaboration. And ‘radical’ just means that it’s going to take basically all elements of that value chain working together to achieve the demands of the future.”

Secure Data-Sharing with Multiple Stakeholders

Aveva announced two new strategic partnerships at the conference with Vulcan Energy Resources (VER) and Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC).

Vulcan Energy Resources (VER) is a lithium and renewable energy producer, specializing in the production of lithium with a net-zero carbon footprint. The partnership will support a €1.5 billion engineering project in Germany’s Upper Rhine Valley, whereby Aveva’s enterprise-wide software CONNECT will be integrated across the different project phases and industrial assets. Aveva noted that its Contract Risk Management (CRM) and Asset Information Management (AIM), as well as its cutting-edge digital twin and Assai’s Document Control and Management system, will enable secure data sharing among multiple stakeholders including contractors.

Aveva launched its industrial intelligence platform, CONNECT, at Hannover Messe in Germany earlier this year. The platform is built on Aveva software and knits together applications from a diverse range of providers including Schneider Electric, RIB, ETAP and other partners. The platform provides deeper dives into business data and facilitates an intelligent digital twin that unifies insights across a given industrial ecosystem. The objective, according to AVEVA, is to drive performance, optimize efficiency and maximize sustainability for increased ROI.

The second strategic partnership is with Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and aspires to bring the power and capability of quantum compute to customers. While the project is still in its infancy, Aveva noted that the solution is expected to deliver an exponential speed-up over classical techniques, generate cost and power consumption reductions, including AI large language models and big data.

Aveva CEO, Caspar Herzberg, supporting a drive for partnerships and collaboration is a cornerstone in Aveva’s portfolio-wide transition to a subscription-based business model. Joining him onstage at Aveva World 2024 is Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chairman of Schneider Electric, which completed a full acquisition of Aveva in 2023, and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and CTO, Databricks, a data and AI platform provider which focuses on bringing AI to the energy sector.

Other partnerships and use cases represented on the mainstage were Matei Zaharia, co-founder and CTO, Databricks, the data and AI platform provider bringing the power of AI to the energy sector, and Michelin CTO Bruno Batisse, who laid out how the French multinational tyer manufacturer is decarbonizing across their value chain.

Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chairman of Schneider Electric, which completed a full acquisition of Aveva in 2023, was also invited to the mainstage. Schneider Electric has progressively built out a digital toolbox to help enterprises develop full digital twins, starting with EcoStruxure, an IoT-enabled plug-and-play open architecture and platform for energy and automation systems. Schneider built its agnostic software portfolio on top of this, so that software would not be dependent on any specific hardware platform. Schneider’s suite of agnostic software extends across both industrial automation and energy management and includes Schneider’s IGE+XAO, ALPI, ETAP and RIB Software.

Software and Design Capabilities Can Serve Key Vertical Markets

At this year’s event, Aveva showcased key capabilities of several products designed to further optimize operations and improve collaboration, including Industrial AI Assistant, United Engineering, Operations Control and PI Data Infrastructure.

Aveva’s full suite includes simulation, engineering and design, asset information management, 3D asset visualization, enterprise asset management, unified supply chain, system platform and MES, Plant SCADA, production management, predictive analytics, and PI system.

Aveva’s CEO, Caspar Herzberg, announced new strategic partnerships with Vulcan Energy Resources (VER) and Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) at Aveva World 2024.

Once regarded as a niche design software developer, Aveva has a value of more than £10 billion (about $12.97 billion) and more than 20,0000 customers.

The global software provider held its annual flagship software conference at the Paris’ Palais des Congrès, bringing together 3,500 delegates, including senior leaders from 13 industrial sectors and 600 companies. Key industrial verticals included power, chemicals, minerals and food & beverage.