AVEVA Group Limited is a British industrial software company headquartered in Cambridge. Its solutions serve sectors including energy, chemicals, manufacturing, infrastructure and water treatment. They support several stages of the equipment lifecycle: designing a plant, preparing for its construction, running operations and improving performance. Its website, aveva.com, presents an offering aimed primarily at companies operating complex facilities.
Origins in computer-aided design
AVEVA’s history dates back to 1967, with the establishment in Cambridge of the Computer-Aided Design Centre, or CADCentre, a British initiative dedicated to computer-aided design. The company gradually built its expertise around modeling industrial facilities, particularly in three dimensions. These tools enable engineers to coordinate different disciplines and identify incompatibilities before projects are physically built.
Its scope changed significantly in 2018, when Schneider Electric’s industrial software operations were combined with AVEVA. The merger expanded its offering beyond engineering into supervisory control and operations management. In 2021, the acquisition of OSIsoft added an important component: collecting and using data from industrial equipment. Schneider Electric then completed its acquisition of AVEVA in 2023, leading to its delisting from the London Stock Exchange.
Connecting engineering models with field data
AVEVA’s portfolio combines several software categories. Its engineering solutions are used to design facilities and organize their technical information. Its supervisory control software, historically associated notably with Wonderware, makes it possible to visualize processes and support their control. Other applications cover production management, simulation and asset performance analysis.
Originally developed by OSIsoft, PI System collects, stores historical records of and contextualizes operational data from multiple sources. It provides a foundation for monitoring facility operations, analyzing deviations and supplying data to maintenance or optimization applications. The value of this suite lies in the continuity between design and operational information, rather than simply digitizing an isolated task.
AVEVA is also developing its cloud offering around CONNECT, a platform designed to facilitate data sharing and access to industrial applications. This approach must accommodate heterogeneous environments, legacy equipment and stringent availability and cybersecurity requirements.
What next?
For AVEVA, the challenge is to make this data easier to use across functions, sites and partners. Artificial intelligence, digital twins and cloud services offer opportunities to better anticipate failures or reduce resource consumption. Their adoption, however, depends on data quality, interoperability and demonstrable operational benefits. Being part of Schneider Electric provides an industrial foundation, while the ability to work with equipment and systems from different suppliers remains crucial.