Google LLC today announced a collaboration with OSIsoft LLC to help enterprises deploy the OSIsoft’s PI Core industrial operations platform on Google Cloud.

San Leandro, California-based OSIsoft is a major provider of software for the industrial sector that was recently acquired by the U.K.’s Aveva Group plc in a $5 billion deal. The company’s PI Core platform is the foundation of its PI System software suite.

That suite is used by companies such as manufacturers to collect information about their operations and find ways to increase efficiency. PI Core deployments also support the day-to-day activities of companies in other industries such as life sciences, pharmaceuticals and energy, among others.

Google says that deploying PI Core on Google Cloud will allow customers to take advantage of its built-in data encryption tools and other security features. Moreover, the search giant argues, using its public cloud can help organizations extract more value from the data they store in OSIsoft’s software.

PI Core enables companies to store years’ worth of historical information from manufacturing equipment, sensors, factory management systems and other devices. Such data contains valuable patterns that can be useful for business analysts tasked with improving operational efficiency. A manufacturer, for example, can scan records about past equipment malfunctions to identify ways of reducing production downtime, or compare the quality of different raw material shipments to streamline its supply chain.

Google Cloud provides access to machine learning services that can help enterprises extract such insights. Moreover, Google is making the case that its cloud also offers certain benefits to customers who wish to keep running PI Core on-premises. According to the search giant, a company could pull data from multiple on-premises PI Core deployments into a single “aggregation” environment hosted on Google Cloud to facilitate centralized processing. 

To ease the creation of cloud-based PI Core environments, Google has open-sourced a collection of deployment automation scripts. The scripts use the popular PowerShell and Terraform administration tools. They install PI Core in compute instances from the N2D series Google introduced last year, which is based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc. processors.

Google plans to release additional scripts down the road that will enable companies to deploy PI Core in a high-availability mode to reduce the risk of outages. In that mode, the software is deployed across two separate Google Cloud data centers at once so that it can be quickly recovered if one of the facilities encounters a technical issue.

For the major infrastructure-as-a-service providers, making popular enterprise applications easier to deploy on their platforms can be a way to win more customers. Moving workloads that support a company’s most important operations to a new environment is a complicated and by extension often costly task. The simpler a cloud operator can make the process, the more practical it is for companies to adopt its platform.

Similar considerations led Google to launch its Database Migration Service  into general availability last month. The service automates some of the manual tasks normally involved in moving relational databases to its cloud. 

Image: Google