Operational Historians/Industrial Data Platforms Selection

This Selection Guide includes extensive selection criteria and strategies to help in choosing the Operational Historian/Industrial Data Platform technology and supplier that best meets your specific current and future needs.

Operational Historian Overview

​The scope of the selection criteria allows the user to identify and rate the importance of specific functionality required by an individual site or corporation, whether it is an Operational Historian for an isolated island of automation, or a centralized industrial data platform solution for an entire enterprise.  It allows those involved in the selection to make quicker and improved decisions to select the solution that fits your application best, delivers the lowest cost of ownership, and makes your business as competitive as possible.

Operational historians have now moved beyond their traditional role as a tool focused on the collection and archiving data to better understand past plant performance.  They have now become powerful industrial data platforms that can be used to help improve real-time operations.  With increased data throughput and higher data resolutions, operational historians have also become a foundation for many plant applications including production management, energy optimization, and plant asset management.  Today's historians also support techniques, such as complex event processing, which can analyze multiple streams of plant data in real-time to identify and diagnose emerging problems before they disrupt the production process in the plant, or negatively affect smart grid or other distributed assets.

Operational Historian/Industrial Data Platform Selection Strategic Issues

ARC has been researching this market for over two decades and we understand the challenge companies have in selecting and implementing a solution that will best meets their specific plant or corporate wide requirements.  This includes:

• Compatibility with current installed base of technology
• Integration with business systems
• Integration and support of other industrial technologies such as advanced analytics, augmented reality, and machine learning
• Breadth and depth of supplier’s vertical market solution support
• Support, training, and spares
• Understanding the total cost of owner-ship for OEMs and end users
• Architecture based on standards
• Architecture incorporating Cloud, IIoT, Virtual Servers, etc.
• Designs for maximum reliability
• Supplier long term viability and vision

This ARC Selection Guide will help you select the best available Operational Historian/Industrial Data Platform to meet your needs now and in the future.