Focus on Seeq: AWS, Insight Partners, and other disruptions to IoT analytics Market

The Internet of Things (IoT) Analytics, ranging from edge to core cloud intelligence, is a growing market with several interesting players emerging. Seeq is one of those players and is making waves in the Industrial IoT analytics. In April 2021, the vendor managed to secure a US$50 million Series C Funding Round led by Insight Partners. The round includes participation from existing investors: Cisco Investments, Chevron Technology Ventures, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, and Altira Group. This round brings Seeq’s total funding since inception to approximately US$115 million. Seeq has already been positioned as a solid industrial player in the Manufacturing (CA-1266), Oil and Gas (AN-5322), and Pharma industries (IN-5877).

With Series C funding, it is expected for Seeq to scale their business further. Hence, it was a no surprise when the vendor announced the new version of its latest product for manufacturing data discovery/migration—with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which includes the Seeq and AWS Glue integration for Enterprise Historians.

Seeq's AWS Glue integration for Enterprise Historians enables operational data (OT data) discovery and availability in AWS. The functionality allows enterprises to bring OT data into a broader organizational context and establish higher visibility across processes, and even products. By accessing tagged data and metadata in historian databases, including OSIsoft PI, PI Asset Framework, AspenTech InfoPlus.21, the challenges of getting access to siloed operational data and ensuring its context are simplified. Additionally, the service comes with visualization and security connections to on-premise historian databases, manages data discoverability, and enables teams to access periods of historical data labeled by small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) for machine learning in AWS in near real-time.

One of the compelling use cases for Seeq’s AWS Glue integration is the Predictive Analytics for reduced equipment downtime:

• The service is targeting Process engineers, maintenance teams, data science, and data engineers.
• Query-driven operational data discovery and access using Seeq's proven data connectors—that enable to simplify data discovery.
• One service for many historians with on-demand data querying.
• Integrated security.
• Seamless collaboration between OT and IT for data science: operational teams can select, cleanse, contextualize and model data in Seeq Workbench and then make it available to data science teams using AWS services (SageMaker, etc.).

While the data discovery, labeling, cleaning, and data organizing is taking up to 55% of the data scientists time, mining for patterns and building models could take up to 20% and 10%, respectively. The integration between Seeq and AWS enables users to accelerate the time-to-value for data discovery through AWS Glue accessibility to operational data via Seeq Cortex, and utilize the Spark-based managed data migration service that provides a low code mechanism to schedule a data transfer from a source to a target. Seeq’s Workbench and Data Lab is delivering faster model creation and pattern recognition.

Hence, in the context of Series C funding and expectation for scaling its business, Seeq is making a leap into the data management market by partnering with AWS, and instead of creating a streaming or data integration service (that are offered by many vendors), they are picking the existing problem with IoT and proving an exact solution to it—in this case, the on-demand data discovery and integration. Currently, the product is available in the AWS Marketplace as BYOL (bring your own license) with US, Canada, and EMEA availability. The vendor is sticking to its core verticals thus far, which are chemicals, pharma/life sciences, O&G, power gen and utilities, and food and beverage.