AVEVA PI System news and industry analysis

Meta description: Practical PI System news analysis for admins and architects: how to read AVEVA updates, assess trends like MQTT/UNS, cloud and AI, and plan safely.

PI System news matters because it can change what you can do and how you should plan. Announcements mix marketing, rumour and engineering detail. This page is an evergreen guide for following PI System news so PI Admins, Engineers and OT/IT architects make better operational and architectural decisions.

You’ll find:

A practical lens for reading announcements critically
Recurring industry trends that affect PI programmes (MQTT/UNS, cloud, AI)
Signals to watch if you run PI at scale: architecture, security, ingestion, licensing
A checklist to use when a stakeholder asks: “Should we change direction?”

Scope and audience

Who this is for

PI Admins: stable operations and predictable change control
(Related: Operations & Administration)
PI Engineers: ingestion and modelling that survives re-platforming
(Related: Data Ingestion & Integration)
OT/IT architects: balancing plant constraints, security and enterprise integration
(Related: Architecture & Design)

Why PIAdmin.com treats product direction as an engineering constraint Product direction shapes which components you standardise on, which skills you retain, governance and DR design, and integrations that are costly to reverse (brokers, historians, identity).

How to read announcements critically

Distinguish available vs supported vs operationally sensible Ask:

What is it? (capability, packaging, end-of-life)
Who benefits? (persona/use case)
What changes in operations? (skills, monitoring, backup, DR, patch cadence)

If operations change, treat the announcement like a project.

Ask “what problem is this solving?” Durable direction targets persistent pains: edge-to-enterprise ingestion, reducing point-to-point fragility, improved identity governance, cross-site standardisation. Vagueness often signals positioning, not a stable technical path.
Read implied changes around CONNECT and licensing CONNECT emphasis often implies cloud-managed services, stronger identity/tenant governance, and a shift to continuous operations. Licensing shifts can affect redundancy, scaling and long-term data choices. For architectural context see Designing a Scalable and Resilient PI System Architecture and Keeping PI Fast, Stable, and Predictable at Scale.
Expect migration guidance Credible announcements should explain coexistence, migration steps (even high level), toolchain impact and support lifecycle. If they don’t, the burden is on you.
Verify security and compliance impact early Include security (identity, certificates, segmentation, audits) from the start. Use Securing the AVEVA PI System in Modern Enterprise Environments as a baseline: least privilege, certificate hygiene and defensible network design.

Trends: MQTT/UNS, cloud, AI

Trends persist because they solve decoupling, scalability and reuse constraints.

Trend 1: MQTT and the UNS (Unified Namespace)

MQTT adoption rises when organisations want a lightweight publish model, store-and-forward at the edge, and decoupling between producers and consumers.
PI teams encounter MQTT as either an ingestion path into PI or as PI being one consumer among many.
UNS is a design pattern, not a product: it offers consistent naming and a shared source of truth but requires governance for topics, schema evolution and versioning. Operational reality: broker-first reduces point-to-point fragility but increases the need for data product ownership and schema discipline.

Practical questions on MQTT/UNS announcements:

Does this change AF modelling or only transport?
Do we need broker HA, monitoring and OT-friendly patching?
How will topics reconcile with tag naming, templates and event frames?
What is the fallback when a broker or connector fails?

Trend 2: Cloud and CONNECT Treat “cloud” as two decisions: where the workload runs (on-prem, IaaS, PaaS/SaaS) and how you operate it (patching, identity, monitoring, incident response). Both matter.

Real cloud drivers: cross-site access, centralised security, cloud analytics integration, faster provisioning. Common false assumptions: cloud automatically improves reliability or reduces cost without deliberate design.

CONNECT mentions often imply greater emphasis on identity federation, certificate lifecycle, data boundary design and end-to-end observability. These are essential for regulated or safety-critical environments.

Trend 3: AI (industrial reality) AI use cases (predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, conversational interfaces) hinge on data products, not models. AI needs:

contextualised time-series (AF attributes, units, quality, metadata)
event context (batches, downtime, operator actions)
consistent history and stable naming

AI amplifies poor modelling, inconsistent semantics and undocumented scaling. The strategic asset is context and governance: AF models, naming and data lifecycle defensibility.

What PI teams should watch (signals that affect your roadmap)

Data ingestion direction Watch for changes in recommended ingestion tooling, MQTT emphasis and connector deployment models. Key questions:

Centralised vs per-site deployment?
How to monitor ingestion end-to-end?
Backfill strategy after outages?
How to prevent configuration drift?

Architecture shifts Announcements can trigger consolidation, segmentation or regional hubs. Revisit latency vs resilience trade-offs, failure domains and operational ownership. Reference Designing a Scalable and Resilient PI System Architecture and Keeping PI Fast, Stable, and Predictable at Scale.
Performance and scale Product changes often increase data volume and consumers. Defence: capacity planning, baselining and change control.
Security direction Monitor expectations for SSO/MFA, certificate defaults, supported OS versions and hardening guidance. Treat security as collaborative: PI admins, OT security, IT security and app owners must agree. Reference Securing the AVEVA PI System in Modern Enterprise Environments.
Licensing and commercial packaging Watch for bundling, subscription framing and cloud consumption models. Actions:

keep an accurate inventory of servers, interfaces and endpoints
document production vs non-production
engage procurement early for DR, buffering or regional hubs

Skills and roles Track trends that change day-to-day work: Linux in OT ecosystems, certificate/identity operations, broker and streaming knowledge, and data product ownership. Successful teams document standards, invest in reproducible deployments and define on-call boundaries. See Careers in the AVEVA PI System World.

A practical framework for deciding “do we act?”

Step 1: Classify the news

Lifecycle (support, deprecation)
Integration (connectors, cloud, brokers)
Security (identity, encryption)
Commercial (licensing)
User value (visualisation, self-service)

Step 2: Map impact to your operating model Ask:

Does this affect 24/7 operations?
Does it add a new dependency (broker, IdP, cloud service)?
Does it change incident detection or ownership? If you can’t name the owner, don’t adopt it yet.

Step 3: Decide: Monitor, Pilot, Standardise or Avoid

Common pitfalls

Chasing novelty while ignoring backlog: unresolved basics (interface stability, AF governance, certificate hygiene) will increase operational load.
Treating MQTT/UNS as a PI replacement: they usually complement PI; PI still excels at historisation and AF modelling when governed.
Underestimating the cost of each integration: new failure modes, credential rotation, monitoring and support ownership.

Getting help

Cross-team changes (CONNECT integration, licensing, MQTT/UNS, security hardening) stall when ownership is unclear. For short-term capacity, hire a specialist to deliver a bounded artefact (architecture review, ingestion design, hardening runbook) and fold it into standards. For long-term capability, invest in hiring and mentoring. See Careers in the AVEVA PI System World.

AVEVA PI System news and industry analysis

AVEVA PI System news and industry analysis

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