New Jersey-based Cognizant and Chicago firm Uptake are using Microsoft Azure to enable unified data management for the energy and utilities industries.

Industrial intelligence software-as-a-service company Uptake is bringing together Uptake Fusion, which collects, moves, organises and curates data in Azure to power industrial analytics and asset performance management, with the consulting, systems integration and application services of Cognizant.

“Uptake Fusion raises the value of the investments industrial operators have made in their existing operational technology (OT) data and automation systems,” said David Cox, assistant vice president at Cognizant. “It cost-effectively allows companies to set up data lakes, in addition to enterprise-wide asset monitoring, automated reporting and digital twins. With Uptake Fusion, Cognizant strengthens the ability of our customers to realise the value of data intelligence sooner and at scale.”

In their enterprise cloud environment, industrial companies can use Uptake Fusion to provide internal and third-party data consumers with the data needed for industrial intelligence. Users can leverage its open APIs as plug-ins with existing non-proprietary tools such as Microsoft Power BI, PowerApps and Azure Time Series Insights for dashboards, reporting and monitoring.

“Process companies have their personnel and technical challenges with the availability of industrial intelligence for their maintenance, reliability, financial and operational teams,” said Kayne Grau, CEO of Uptake. “Uptake’s partnership with Cognizant widens and accelerates access to industrial AI while also curating and strengthening the integrity of OT data for broad enterprise use.”

Uptake Fusion connects to underlying OT systems that contain time-series data, including OSIsoft PI, Rockwell FactoryTalk and Inductive Automation Ignition, among other scada, historian and IIoT sensors to enable analytics applications. Through secure data movement, storage orchestration and curation with other enterprise data sets such as SAP, IBM and Oracle, Uptake provides a rapid, scalable approach to unlock the pent-up demand of AI-enabled industrial intelligence.

Cognizant’s energy and utilities consulting practice operates as an advisory partner to utility and energy companies, helping them leverage operational value from a digital world. Its business consulting professionals ensure that energy and utilities clients receive business results from their technology investments and sourcing programmes.

Its domain experts leverage data to automate insights in the subsurface evaluation and oil and gas reservoir characterisation and improve facets of utility operations by discovering value from data. They work with clients to leverage digital technologies to integrate distributed energy resources, create intelligent digital oil fields, adapting to increased customer and stakeholder demands while driving efficiency. They advance energy and utility strategies in controls centres for grid modernisation, AI for real-time monitoring of wells or fields, leak detection and prevention on pipelines, incorporating wind and solar energy sources in portfolios, securing evolving IT and OT systems, and providing advice for AMI 2.0 from strategy to deployments.

With more than 40 patents, Uptake is headquartered in Chicago with a presence in Canada, South America, Europe, India and Australia.