Unleashing the intrinsic value of data with Emerson’s AspenTech Inmation
Data management has never been more important. Now, more than ever, companies are being inundated with industrial data — both structured and unstructured. Emerson’s AspenTech Inmation provides the platform to gather and analyze the enormous amounts of structured and unstructured operations data from across the plant or enterprise, including measurements, states, aggregates, alarms, videos, pictures and event data.
As an off-the-shelf data integration platform, Inmation helps companies create a real-time infrastructure for holistic monitoring of all acquired industrial data, reducing the total cost of ownership, while enhancing digital integration. The scalable software integrates machinery and components independent of manufacturer, from micro-installations for a single host to enterprise-wide solutions with hundreds of systems globally.
The Inmation data management platform “enables our customers to take the data they have in their shop-floor systems and unleash it,” Hasit Patel, global enterprise director for Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, told an audience at Emerson Exchange 2025. “We take all the data that you have. There’s none left behind.”
Inmation features a central data repository which stores all types of data required for reports and analytics with integrated visualization to significantly reduce the manhours and time to produce highly accurate and flexible reports.
“We curate all the data in a central repository—making sure the data is clean and any calculations you need to normalize the data are there,” Patel said. “Inmation allows you to store the information and then we can release it to applications.”
Seamless and secure data pipelines
Inmation provides seamless and secure OT/IT data pipelines for enterprise and cloud-based application solutions. At Emerson Exchange, attendees learned how Inmation is being leveraged to move real-time railcar loading and lab data into the cloud to advance shipment and production accounting.
Vishal Singh, business development for industrial software and applications for Spartan Controls, told Emerson Exchange attendees about a use case implemented in Western Canada. With its built-in contextualized data collection and scripting technologies, Inmation was able to actively deliver accurate railcar loading information to the commercial reporting systems.
Singh noted that Inmation “pre-processes data so that the end systems receiving the data are not processing the data—it is consumption-ready data that is available” to customers.
“There is a lot of data processing required to generate the complete information profile of a fully loaded railcar,” Singh said. “Throughout this whole process, there were multiple steps with data generated at each stage, with the data required by the commercial system to generate a trusted invoice.”
Inmation not only provides a cost-effective mechanism to automate data gathering, analysis, visualization and reporting; it also has the flexibility to adapt to future requirements.
At Emerson Exchange, attendees learned about the Inmation product roadmap — including making its user interface “more OT-centric” — and how it is architected with Aspen InfoPlus.21 (IP.21), part of Emerson’s AspenTech DataWorks, to further bridge the OT/IT space.
IP.21 is an industrial process historian for collecting and storing large volumes of process data for analysis and reporting. With IP.21, users drive performance improvements and optimize decision-making through near real-time asset visibility, analysis and monitoring, providing critical business metrics via dashboards, alerts and pattern matching to provide insights into plant performance.
Chris Porter, a solution consultant with Emerson who architects solutions using IP.21 and Inmation, discussed a gRPC driver bridge for companies that already have IP.21 historian running and are looking for ways to use that OT data elsewhere.
“For those exploring ways to get IP.21 OT data into the enterprise, Inmation with this bridge is definitely the way to go,” Porter said.
