Whitepaper - Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of the
Chemical Reference Architecture

(ChemRA)
The Microsoft Chemical Reference Architecture (ChemRA) is an initiative being undertaken by Microsoft
and many of its partners. A first goal of the initiative was to define an approach and a set of standard
principles to serve as the foundation for chemical manufacturing and oil refining businesses to build a
unified technical architecture that can support their enterprise architecture and domain operations
ultimately helping them achieve new efficiencies, be more competitive, and potentially realize new value
in a complex global economy.
The initiative vision was presented in a white paper, Microsoft Vision of a Reference Architecture for the
Chemical and Oil Refining Industries (ChemRA), which was published in July 2011 and is available on the
ChemRA Website at: http://www.microsoft.com/chemra.
This second white paper serves as a high-level implementation of ChemRA using Microsoft technologies.
It maps these technologies to the five guiding principles of ChemRA, describes their functional roles in the
overall architecture, and highlights how they address specific challenges faced by chemical
manufacturing and oil refining businesses. Links throughout the paper provide access to more details.
Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA
Contents
Microsoft Technology Mapped to the ChemRA Principles ........................................................................... 4
Natural User Experience ........................................................................................................................... 4
Silverlight............................................................................................................................................... 5
HTML5 Standard ................................................................................................................................... 7
SharePoint and ASP.Net Web Parts ...................................................................................................... 8
Microsoft Office Client Products ......................................................................................................... 10
Windows Presentation Foundation .................................................................................................... 10
Microsoft Kinect SDK........................................................................................................................... 11
Windows Phone .................................................................................................................................. 11
Application Interoperability .................................................................................................................... 12
Windows Communication Foundation ............................................................................................... 13
BizTalk Server ...................................................................................................................................... 14
Windows Server AppFabric ................................................................................................................. 16
Windows Azure AppFabric .................................................................................................................. 17
Azure Connect ..................................................................................................................................... 18
Duet Enterprise ................................................................................................................................... 20
SQL Server Integration Technologies .................................................................................................. 21
Business Insight ....................................................................................................................................... 22
The Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform .................................................................................... 22
Enhanced Collaboration .......................................................................................................................... 34
Evolution of Collaboration Technologies ............................................................................................ 34
Business Process Management........................................................................................................... 34
Communication and Notifications ...................................................................................................... 38
Social Web........................................................................................................................................... 39
Microsoft Office365 ............................................................................................................................ 40
Solid Infrastructure ................................................................................................................................. 41
Security ............................................................................................................................................... 41
Systems Management: System Center ............................................................................................... 43
Virtualization ....................................................................................................................................... 44
High Performance Computing............................................................................................................. 46

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 48
Appendix A: Partner Proof Points ............................................................................................................... 49
Accenture ................................................................................................................................................ 49
AspenTech............................................................................................................................................... 53
Invensys Operations Management ......................................................................................................... 57
Microsoft Technology Mapped to the ChemRA Principles

The vision white paper discussed the five principles of ChemRA, which include:
Natural User Experience (See page 4.)
Application Interoperability (See page 12.)
Business Insight (See page 22.)
Enhanced Collaboration (See page 34.)
Solid Infrastructure (See page 41.)
Figure 1 shows how current Microsoft technologies (at paper publication date) map to the five
principles. The paper elaborates on each of these technologies and shows how each can be used in the
overall architecture.
The purpose is not to provide a deep dive into each of these technologies, but rather, a high-level
overview and definition as well as an explanation of how these technologies fit into the chemical and oil
refining industry scenarios and help to address industry challenges. Links to more information about
these technologies are also provided.
Figure 1 Key Microsoft technologies that can be used in ChemRA
Natural User Experience

Natural user experience is about helping usersyour peopleto interact with technology in easy and
humanly intuitive ways to help maximize worker safety and productivity. Chemical manufacturers and
oil refiners require a variety of software technologies to run and manage their operations and business.
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Traditionally, companies acquired applications from different vendors that had different user interfaces
(UI) and used different technologies. These applications could be difficult for people to use because they
had to learn each product's interface and try to navigate through the maze of menus, submenus, and
toolbars to find needed functions.
New user interfaces are designed for simplicity and to enhance productivity. Technology is making it
possible to design interfaces that can filter and display information based on user roles and present only
the relevant commands, functions, and information. Interfaces now feature rich, composite dashboards
and are accessible from mobile devices. These interfaces also incorporate natural human interaction
allowing workers to use gestures, voice, and touch. This section describes some of the Microsoft
technologies that are crucial to evolving interfaces to promote a natural user experience.
Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a free, cross-platform browser plug-in that enables highly interactive media
experiences, rich business applications through Rapid Internet Application (RIA) support, and mobile
application support. Silverlight is an extension of the .NET Framework and includes support for
Extensible Application Mark-up Language (XAML), which is also supported by Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF), making it possible to do declarative programming as well as traditional programming
using managed code in .NET. Silverlight integration with Microsoft SharePoint makes it possible to build
highly interactive Web Parts (fundamental UI component building blocks used in SharePoint that allow
end users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of Web pages directly from a browser).
Figure 2 shows a dashboard with an interactive Silverlight 4.0 Web Part that represents a chemical
process in a plant. It shows integration of this Web Part with communication functionality (Microsoft
Lync) and the ability to show critical key performance indicators (KPIs) right on the diagram. Users can
zoom in on different parts of the diagram, click or hover over them to display relevant KPIs and more.
Figure 2 Highly interactive Silverlight Web Part showing KPIs and integration with Microsoft Lync.
PivotViewer is a free Silverlight control that allows for powerful, informative, and fun interaction with
massive amounts of data on the Web. Figure 3 shows the PivotViewer architecture.
Figure 3 Architecture of PivotViewer Silverlight control with an example.
Data can be accessed from any number of sources, such as files, Web data, databases, and others, as
long as it can be accessed in standard ways, such as XML. The data is then displayed in the PivotViewer
control, which is hosted in a Silverlight application in the browser. Users can select various data options
that manipulate views of the data, for example, PivotViewer can be used to analyze different equipment
used on the plant floor by different parameters, such as, manufacturer, plant location, energy use, and
others. PivotViewer's Deep Zoom technology lets users filter the data and zoom in on and view images
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of the equipment from different angles. PivotViewer is available for chemicals and refining solution
developers to incorporate into their applications to improve data visualization and interactivity.
HTML5 Standard
HTML5 is a standard that is still under development by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) with the
help of leading technology companies. It is a combination of more than 100 specifications related to the
next generation of Web technologies. HTML5 can be considered an umbrella over three key areas:
HTML, cascading style sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. The goal of HTML5 is to enhance the current
specifications in these areas and make them better able to handle many new powerful scenarios for
Web applications, including many business scenarios.
Because HTML5 is a global information technology standard, its future promise is the ability to build
interoperable applications with programming code that can run on different platforms and in different
desktop or mobile browsers, adding great efficiencies and speed in getting new products to market.
Chemical manufacturers and oil refiners businesses could benefit from such solutions by provide quick
visibility and mobile access into enterprise and manufacturing data, such as metrics, schedules, alerts
and more.
However, this vision will take some time to become a reality because the standard is still under
development and many technology providers have adopted different parts of the standards that may
not map completely to what other technology providers have adopted.
Strategically, Microsoft's is providing extensive support for HTML5 and began commercial product
support in Internet Explorer (IE) 9. Windows Phone 7.5 (code name Mango) also provides extensive
support through the included mobile IE browser. This year, Microsoft also updated its developer tools,
Visual Studio 2010/SP1 and Expression Web 4, to support HTML5 tags and validation (Figure 4).
Figure 4 HTML5 validation support in Visual Studio 2010/SP1.
SharePoint and ASP.Net Web Parts

Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration platform that provides many capabilities for managing, using,
and sharing information, and so it is discussed in several sections of this paper. The top row of Figure 5
shows the main capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, including composites, which are
discussed further below.
Figure 5 Microsoft SharePoint Server capabilities.
Composites are applications that are composed according to the end user needs allowing for creating
powerful, flexible dashboards composed of different Web Parts. Each Web Part could pull data from
different data sources making them a great way to integrate the user interface of different legacy lineof-business applications as well as manufacturing and engineering applications. With this, the end user
does not have to learn several applications and deal with updates to their interfaces every now and
then; instead, the end user can deal with most of the data they need from all of these applications in
one place, their dashboard. Many chemical and oil refining solution providers have started building such
dashboards and including them in their offerings, thereby providing rich platforms for collaboration,
business intelligence, content management, and business process and workflow management.
Figure 6 shows an executive dashboard combining several Web Parts in a SharePoint environment.
Figure 6 Executive dashboard created using SharePoint Web Parts.
One of the Web Parts is integrated with Bing Maps to show the locations of the organization's different
plants across the world. The locations are marked with color-coded smart pins that show much more
information about the plants at a glance. Other Web Parts on the dashboard show different
performance metrics the user needs to follow and relevant contacts that she can email, chat or talk to in
real time.
Several Microsoft industry partners (for example, OSIsoft, Invensys, Siemens, and Honeywell) have
already leveraged these technologies and integrated them in their applications offering their customers
flexible dashboard views into their manufacturing and business operations.
For almost a decade, the chemical and oil refining industries have been using Web-based applications
built with ASP.NET technology. The Web Parts concept has now been extended to ASP.NET using Web
Part controls, which allows the building of mash-ups and composite applications directly in ASP.NET.
Microsoft Office Client Products

Microsoft Office clients (such as Outlook, Word, and Excel) offer varying degrees of extensibility for lineof-business and technical applications. Traditionally, these applications were extended into the Office
clients with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). However, beginning with the release of Microsoft Office
2007, all Office client applications now support .NET managed code, which makes integrating Office
clients with industry solutions much easier and more standardized. The client applications also support
information rights management (IRM), a critical feature for creating certain types of application, for
example, regulatory compliance. With SharePoint as an enterprise content management system for
compliance documents and forms, extended applications make it easy for organizations to manage
compliance with health and safety or environmental regulations. Several Microsoft partners, including
IHS and NextDocs, have used these technologies to build solutions that can be used by chemical
manufacturers and refining businesses.
Windows Presentation Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a .NET graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces for
Windows-based applications. To render its screens, WPF replaces the older Graphic Device Interface
(GDI) subsystem, with DirectX, the same graphical engine used by Microsoft's popular XBOX gaming
module. WPF also supports XAML, the descriptive language used to create Windows or Web
applications. The WPF runtime libraries are included in the Windows operating system since Windows
Vista and Windows Server 2008. Figure 7 shows the different technology components and architecture
of WPF.
Figure 7 WPF architecture.
These components make it possible to: build data-driven applications with excellent graphical
capabilities; create document viewers; manage text, audio, and video; and include 2D and 3D effects
and animation. Several solution providers have already leveraged these capabilities in their
manufacturing applications, including: human-machine interfaces (HMI), manufacturing execution
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systems (MES), and application containers that include a variety of functions, such as reporting, alerting,
and collaboration.
Microsoft Kinect SDK
It might be surprising, but Kinect technology that was first used in the XBOX is now making its way into
many industries and applications, including the chemical industry. Kinect makes it possible to use
natural means, like voice and gesture, to interact with computers and applications. In chemical
engineering or oil refining environments, Kinect can be used to
Enhance security by recognizing faces or certain gestures to admit people into physical or computer
systems.
Facilitate system interaction by use of gestures or combination of gesture and voice in environments
where workers must wear thick gloves that prohibit using traditional input devices, such as a
computer keyboard or mouse.
Control cameras or inspection devices remotely in a chemically hazardous area.
A beta version of the Kinect for Windows SDK is available for download so that solution providers can
start planning and building solutions using this technology.
Windows Phone
Mobile devices, such as smart phones and more recently tablets, have become wildly popular with
consumers, so it is only natural for industry solution providers to develop applications for these devices.
Microsoft had been in the mobile application business for many years, including several embedded
operating systems, such as Windows Embedded, Windows CE, and Windows Mobile. Additionally, many
Microsoft partners (Invensys, for example) have provided applications running on industrial mobile
devices using these operating systems. Most of these applications have been in the controls area with
no user interface, or in the SCADA or HMI area with simple graphical interfaces.
However, with rapid advances in hardware and uptake in smart phone application usage and
development, more sophisticated functionality and applications can be presented on these devicesand
users are expecting more. More elegant, graphically appealing interfaces showing KPIs, simple reports,
production calendars, alerts, and so forth, have started to show up as extensions of larger desktop or
Web applications.
The release of the new Windows Phone platform has presented a new opportunity for Microsoft
partners to provide these richer applications on these devices. Because developers can use the same
technologies they use to build Web and desktop applications to create Windows Phone applications, the
technology increases their efficiency and speeds up application development. Tools and technologies
used to build Windows Phone applications include Visual Studio, managed code, Silverlight, and even
XNA, the language used to develop games for the XBOX. Figure 8 shows the Windows Phone platform
architecture and its main components.
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Figure 8 Windows Phone platform architecture.
An important part of the architecture is cloud services. Windows Phone presents a convenient and
reliable way to surface data from remote Web services hosted in a cloud environment. These services
could provide many functions, such as authentication and authorization to remote systems, providing
status feeds, such as health checks of remote equipment that are difficult to access, or even aggregated
tag information from sensors on the plant floor to provide early warnings and alerts, or help initiate
business processes to provide preventive maintenance.
Application Interoperability
Lack of application interoperability is a nagging problem for most organizations; it results in
inefficiencies, delays, and increased costs for businesses.
Chemical manufacturers and oil refiners require a myriad of software applications to run and manage all
aspects of their operations and business. No one vendor provides all the technology required.
Companies buy applications from different vendors, build applications in-house, and acquire
applications through mergers and acquisitions.
In today's business environment, it is essential to address the interoperability issues associated with
these applications. Applications must be able to easily exchange data to support the efficient execution
of certain business processes that span the applications within or outside the enterprise boundaries.
For chemical manufacturers and oil refiners, applications on the enterprise network need to share
certain data about production schedule, inventory and order statuses with applications on the
manufacturing network or even with business partners, such as suppliers. Data collected on the controls
network needs to find its way up to the manufacturing management systems and eventually to the
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enterprise systems to provide much needed visibility into the operations to people on the plant floor as
well as executives in the corner office.
Hard-coded, point-to-point solutions that connected specific applications have proven to be very
inefficient and difficult to maintain. The ChemRA vision white paper discussed several solutions that
evolved over time to address the interoperability problems. Some of these included an enterprise
service bus (ESB) or using service oriented architecture (SOA) with Web services.
Microsoft offers many tools and technologies to help solve the interoperability issues for its partners
and customers. Many of these tools and technologies follow open industry standards, such as Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web services. Some of the technologies offer data-based integration
and others offer document-based integration or a hybrid of both. This section briefly describes such
technologies and how they relate to the chemical and oil refining industries.
Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a .NET framework subsystem for building serviceoriented applications. Applications built according to SOA principles expose service end points, and
WCF provides the ability to transmit data asynchronously between these end points. Data sent using
WCF can range in format from simple texts to complex streams of binary data. Some of the main
features of WCF that make it an essential technology for interoperability include:
Service orientation. With WCF, solution providers can build applications with loosely coupled
services that adhere to SOA allowing for cross-platform interoperability (as long as service contracts
are met).
Support for open standards for interoperability such as the Web Services (WS) Profile and the
different Web Services Extensions (WS*).
Support for multiple message patterns, such as request/response, one-way, or even duplex
messaging, similar to messages exchanged in instant messaging.
Service metadata. WCF supports open standards, such as Web Service Description Language (WSDL),
XML schema, and WS-Policy to publish service metadata, which allows for automatic generation of
client applications accessing such Web services.
Data contracts that specify data types and conditions used by the service.
Security through support for encryption, authentication, and open security standards, such as
secure socket layer (SSL) or WS-security standards.
Multiple transport and encodings, such as HTTP, WS-ReliableMessaging and Microsoft Message
Queue service (MSMQ). WCF also supports sending binary data efficiently using the message
transmission optimization mechanism (MTOM) standard.
Durable messages allowing for guaranteed delivery of messages, even in cases of disruption.
Extensibility as part of the .NET Platform extensibility options, which allows solution providers to
introduce features not supported out of the box by WCF.
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WCF is a highly flexible technology that works well with other Microsoft technologies. For example,
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) uses WCF services to host workflows. Such workflows make
application development easier by encapsulating workflow steps as activities and hosting such
workflows in WCF services making it easier to communicate with other applications. WCF is tightly
integrated with BizTalk Server (since the 2006/R2 release). WCF is used in the adapter kit to create
BizTalk adapters and connectors to line-of-business applications. Silverlight also uses WCF to connect to
other applications using WCF service end points, which allow Silverlight to be a good platform to build
business applications. Finally, applications using WCF communication can be easily hosted, managed,
and deployed in Windows Server AppFabric application server or the Windows Azure AppFabric.
Figure 9 shows the high level WCF architecture and how its channel model, service model, and
programming model support most industry standards.
Figure 9 WCF high level architecture.
For chemical manufacturers and oil refiners, WCF makes it possible for solution providers to build
powerful, interoperable applications that can leverage WCFs flexible communication protocols and
other technologies to connect to line-of-business applications, such as SAP, or to build powerful
workflow-based applications that address customer business processes. Another benefit, WCF allows
service providers to leverage technologies, like Silverlight, to create business applications with powerful
user interfaces and the ability to extend such applications to a cloud environment by hosting them in
Windows Azure AppFabric.
BizTalk Server
BizTalk Server is one of the main and most mature integration technologies offered by Microsoft. BizTalk
started as an enterprise application integration (EAI) hub, which allowed document-based integration of
different applications inside an organization through a large number of adapters and accelerators built
by Microsoft and its partners. However, BizTalk has evolved over the years to become a world-class
enterprise business-to-business (B2B) hub and an enterprise service bus (ESB) that supports open Web
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services standards. BizTalk enables connectivity of applications within and outside an organization
through use of sophisticated workflows and business rules.
Message Flow in BizTalk
Figure 10 shows the BizTalk architecture's different components and functionality. In general, messages
arrive at the BizTalk server and undergo necessary decoding and transformation before they are pushed
into the Pub/Sub Message Engine (the message box). Messages then undergo the necessary processing
based on preset workflows, message types, business rules, and other factors. After going through the
preset workflows, messages undergo the needed transformations and encoding before they are sent to
their destination.
Figure 10 BizTalk high level architecture.
It is important to note that the business activity monitoring capability allows for tracking messages
through BizTalk, generating detailed reports about these messages, and publishing these reports in a
portal environment, such as SharePoint. The orchestration engine is a workflow engine that executes
workflows that are designed with the Workflow Designer tools in BizTalk. Using the rules engine,
business users compose rules in a simple, English-like language to process messages as they pass
through BizTalk. BizTalk supports many standards, such as electronic data exchange (EDI), which allows
it to work with many kinds of systems, including legacy systems that rely on this technology. Many
partners have built adapters for BizTalk opening the door wide to integrate a large number of systems.
Manufacturing Toolkit for BizTalk Server
The Manufacturing Toolkit for BizTalk Serve is a set of prescriptive guidance documentation and code
samples that demonstrate how BizTalk and WCF can be used to build publish/subscribe (pub/sub)
service-based integration of different systems in the chemical and oil and gas industries. The toolkit
added support for industry standards MIMOSA and OPC UA in BizTalk, which allows developers and
architects to use the sample code and accompanying architecture as a starting point for their
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interoperability solutions. This toolkit is the result of close collaboration between Microsoft, some of its
partners, and standards organizations, such as MIMOSA and OPC Foundation.
Figure 11 shows the architecture of the solution scenario addressed by the toolkit. The toolkit is
composed of BizTalk Server and some additional components built specifically for the toolkit, which
include:
WCF Web service to communicate with standard Tech XML sources.

WCF Web service to facilitate management of application scenarios in which the toolkit is used.
The central CRIS database to hold part information.
A Windows application for administration, management, and reporting of the solutions built
using the toolkit
The Manufacturing Toolkit can be downloaded with more documentation from this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21201
Figure 11 Architecture of the Manufacturing Toolkit for BizTalk Server.
Windows Server AppFabric

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of extensions to the Windows Server application server role for
Internet Information Server (IIS) that allows solution providers to build scalable, more manageable WCFbased applications. Windows Server AppFabric is a set of infrastructure services provided by the
platform to increase developer efficiency so they can focus on building their applications, instead of on
building and maintaining such infrastructure services. The infrastructure pieces provided by Windows
Server AppFabric have two sets of services:
Caching services that speed up access to frequently accessed information, such as session state.
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Hosting services that make it easier to run and manage WCF-based applications, especially those
that incorporate workflow.
Integrating WCF with Windows Server AppFabric makes applications built and hosted on it more
interoperable because they inherit the interoperability features of WCF. These applications will also be
able to incorporate workflows through the integration with WF.
Windows Azure AppFabric
To make it easier to understand Windows Azure AppFabric (simply referred to as AppFabric from now
on), it is important to look at the high-level Windows Azure platform architecture. Figure 12 shows the
four major components of the architecture: Windows Azure (the cloud operating system), SQL Azure
(the cloud relational database), Windows Azure Marketplace, and Windows Azure AppFabric.
Figure 12 Windows Azure platform architecture.
Applications and data can be hosted in the Azure platform using one or more of the components above.
AppFabric provides the cloud middleware for such applications and has three main functions: a service
bus in the cloud, access control, and caching functionality of frequently accessed data. The service bus
component is the most important one for interoperability among disconnected and distributed
applications in the cloud and on-premise.
Figure 13 shows the service bus architecture of AppFabric, which provides secure, reliable connectivity
with guaranteed message delivery between services and applications deployed in the cloud or onpremise.
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Figure 13 Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus architecture.
AppFabric uses standards-based identity providers, such as Active Directory (AD), and Web identities,
such as Live ID (among others), to provide identity and access control to Web applications and services.
AppFabric also provides common integration capabilities (like the ones BizTalk provides on-premise) on
the Windows Azure platform, which allows business activity monitoring, business rules application, and
self-service trading partner community portals.
Businesses in chemical manufacturing and oil refining are beginning to embrace use of the private cloud
environment and are moving some applications there. Applications that are good candidates for such
moves include, supply chain optimization, dynamic pricing, or even historians. As this trend continues,
the need for interoperability among cloud-based applications as well as applications deployed on
premise with those in the cloud will increase. AppFabric serves as a good solution because it provides an
enterprise-scale service bus that spans both the cloud and the on-premise environment through its
connectivity with WCF-based services.
Azure Connect
As discussed in previous sections, the Windows Azure platform includes Windows Azure as an operating
system. This component also includes several subcomponents shown Figure 14.
Figure 14 Components of the Windows Azure OS.
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These components include the following:
Azure Compute is responsible for computations in the Azure platform using combinations of Web
role instances, worker role instances, and VM role instances.
Azure Storage is responsible of non-relational storage within the Azure platform. Azure storage
takes different forms, including binary large objects (BLOBS), Azure Tables, and Queues.
Fabric Controller manages the spawning of different compute instances (Web, worker, or VM role
instances) according to user needs.
Content Distribution Network (CDN) makes it possible store data in data centers close to end users,
which reduces network latency.
Azure Connect provides the technology to securely connect applications and data on premise (using
IPsec protocol) to different roles in the Azure platform. This connection allows computation to span
both on-premise and Azure-based applications. It is an important component to secure
interoperability among such applications as more functions and capabilities are moved to the cloud
in the future. Figure 15 shows a scenario for using Azure Connect that connects databases and
development computers on the corporate network to Web and worker role instances in the Azure
cloud.
Windows
Azure
HPC Worker
HPC
Worker
Role
Instances
HPC
Worker
Role
Instances
Role Instances
Web Role
Instance
IPsec
IPsec
Engineering
Application
(simulations)
Corporate
Network
Figure 15 Azure Connect used to securely connect on-premise applications in the chemical industry to the Azure cloud.
Azure Connect allows solution providers in the chemical and oil refining industries to create distributed
applications where certain functionalities could be hosted on premise and others could be hosted in the
cloud. Good candidates for such deployment include modeling- and simulation-intensive applications
used by R&D. While the main functionality of the application can be run on premise, functions requiring
high performance computing (HPC) could leverage HPC resources deployed in Windows Azure as
needed. Azure Connect could serve as the mechanism to make the different parts of the application
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whether on-premise or in the cloudwork in harmony. This type of implementation could bring
significant savings to businesses because they would not need to host and maintain costly HPC
infrastructure on premise.
Duet Enterprise
SAP and Microsoft have jointly developed Duet Enterprise, which allows their customers to consume
and extend SAP data and applications through Microsoft SharePoint 2010. SAP is widely used in the
chemical and oil refining industries for enterprise resource planning (ERP), and many also use it for other
purposes, such as production scheduling, supply chain management, product lifecycle management
(PLM), and customer relationship management (CRM). Integrating SAP data with SharePoint presents a
great opportunity for customers to take full advantage of their SAP deployment and extend data in SAP
systems to more users through one familiar, user-friendly SharePoint environment (Figure 16).
Figure 16 Integrating SAP with SharePoint and Microsoft Office increases the user base of SAP date.
Duet represents an important interoperability tool that allows SAP backend systems to be integrated
with other systems through the SharePoint composite application environment, making it easier for
more than 90% of SAP users to access data and use the system. Duet is one of three ways to integrate
SAP with SharePoint. The three methods vary in flexibility and complexity to implement and include:
Using BizTalk Server adapter for SAP with .NET code. This option offers the most flexibility in
accessing and presenting SAP data; however, it requires the most work (more code development).
Using SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to connect SharePoint to other data sources
that expose their data in the form of XML or through Web services. BCS can connect to SAP through
Web services hosted in the SAP XI platform. This connection method requires less work and custom
coding to implement; however, it offers less flexibility because it is bound by the Web services
contracts exposed on SAP XI.
Duet Enterprise is the easiest way to connect SharePoint to SAP but is the least flexible way. Duet
Enterprise allows solution providers to surface SAP data according to specific scenarios included out
of the box. Additional scenarios can be implemented but require work using the Duet development
tools. Figure 17 shows Duet Enterprise architecture.
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Figure 17 Duet Enterprise architecture.
Duet Enterprise can add real benefits to SAP deployments, both on the infrastructure and application
levels, based on features it inherits from being developed on SharePoint. Infrastructure benefits include:
security, supportability, transaction capabilities, communication capabilities, and scalability. Application
benefits include: workflow support, reporting, Web Parts and Web templates, and support for Web
services.
SQL Server Integration Technologies
SQL Server offers a host of integration technologies. This section briefly discusses the top two SQL
technologies and provides links to more information.
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
SSIS is a highly scalable, programmable, and mature data-based integration mechanism that allows for
enterprise class data extraction, transformation/transmission, and loading (ETL). SSIS can be used to
move data from source databases to destination databases or to online analytical processing (OLAP)
cubes. SSIS provides great flexibility in moving data across database servers, including non-Microsoft
database servers, such as Oracle, flat data files, or other database management systems (DBMS). Many
solution providers in the chemical and oil refining industries develop and deploy SSIS packages as part of
their solutions to allow their customers to easily move data among databases, data marts, or OLAP
cubes.
SQL Server Service Broker (SSSB)
SSSB is a message-based integration technology that was first available in SQL Server 2005. SSSB allows
for queuing, sending, and receiving guaranteed asynchronous messages between SQL Server databases.
These databases could be located on the same server or across multiple servers. This approach is one
way to facilitate efficient guaranteed messaging among databases when the application relies
specifically on Microsoft SQL Server as the backend database server.
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Business Insight
Business intelligence (using operations and business data to support better decision making) is a top
priority for all manufacturers, including chemical and oil and gas companies. Huge quantities of data are
generated at very high rates from all activities in the organization, such as R&D, supply chain,
manufacturing operations, sales and marketing, and so forth. There is a pressing need to maximize the
value of this data, by getting it to the right people (based on their roles), at the right time, to improve
decision making. Technological advances are helping companies handle their mountains of data and
generate the tactical, operational, and strategic reports needed to make better business decisions. This
section presents the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform and explains how its components
apply to ChemRA.
The Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform
Microsoft BI has come a long way since SQL Server OLAP Services, the first product in its family, emerged
more than a dozen years ago. According to its January 2011 survey of BI tools and technologies, Gartner
considers the Microsoft BI platform among the leaders in the industry both in terms of vision and ability
to execute (Figure 18). Microsoft has also extended reporting and analytical capabilities to many
products that are not part of the core BI platform, such as BizTalk and System Center.
Figure 18 Business intelligence leaders according to Gartner.
The core Microsoft BI platform includes several components that are part of SQL Server, SharePoint
Server, and Microsoft Office products (Figure 19). The following sections discuss some of these
technologies and their relevance to ChemRA.
22
Figure 19 The Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.
SQL Server Business Intelligence

SQL Server is the first product to offer BI capabilities through the introduction of Integration Services
(initially Data Transformation Services, DTS) and Analysis Services (initially OLAP Services), followed by
Reporting Services and some data mining capabilities. Over time, these technologies continue to
improve and new capabilities added, such as Master Data Services (MDS) and complex event processing
(CEP) added to SQL Server 2008/R2.
Analysis Services
As mentioned above, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) was the first Microsoft BI product. SSAS
introduced support for multi-dimensional data and OLAP cubes, which allowed for easy analysis, and
slicing and dicing of data to examine what-if scenarios. It also supported different OLAP architectures,
including relational OLAP (ROLAP), multi-dimensional OLAP (MOLAP), and a hybrid of the two (HOLAP),
providing significant flexibility for storing and handling the relational and multi-dimensional data used in
the analysis.
To make it even more effective, SSAS is now coupled with other services in SQL Server, such as SQL
Server Integration Services (SSIS) and data mining. Discussed above in the interoperability section, SSIS is
basically a tool used to move data from the transactional and highly normalized relational data stores to
relational, but de-normalized databases, referred to as data marts or data warehouses, for more
efficient reporting. It is also used to transform relational data in data marts and data warehouse, and
even transactional systems, to dimensional data that can be stored in OLAP cubes for more complex
analysis. As we mention data marts and data warehouses, it is useful to briefly discuss these data
storage architectures, which are shown in Figure 20 and explained further in the following sections.
23

ETL: represents data integration
and transformation
Inventory
ETL
Purchasing
ETL
ERP
Northeast
Northwest
CRM
EMEA
AP
OLAP
CUBE
ETL
Regional Data Marts
SCM
EDW
OLAP
CUBE
ETL
ETL
Mfg Mgmt
R&D
OLAP
CUBE
External
Data
Transactional
Systems
R&D
Data
Warehouse
Customers
& Suppliers
Enterprise
Functional Data Marts

ETL
Figure 20 Relationship between transactional and reporting data stores in the enterprise.
Transactional Databases
Transactional databases are used in applications that allow end users to perform transactions, for
example, applications for ordering parts and inventory management. Data in these databases is
constantly changing by executing the transactions, for example, when new parts are installed during
maintenance operations in the plant, the inventory is be updated. Such transactional systems are usually
optimized for transaction processing by normalizing their table structures. However, this format is not
optimized for reporting, so the data must be transferred to data marts and data warehouses, which
better support reporting functions.
Data Marts and the Enterprise Data Warehouse
Data Marts and the enterprise data warehouses (EDW) are still relational in structure, but their schema
is de-normalized to maximize reporting performance. These databases usually follow one of two
schemas, star or snowflake, and are usually used to populate OLAP cubes. When data marts grow too
big in size, data is often moved to a larger database with a similar schema called a data warehouse. In
some cases, data is moved in the opposite direction from a data warehouse to a data mart, for strategic
reasons to increase reporting robustness or make it easier to handle these data stores. This approach
could lead to regional data marts, or maybe functional data marts.
The data warehouse usually holds data from different data marts, representing different regions,
business applications, or other partitioning schemes of the enterprise data. Cheap storage and faster
connections between database servers and clients accessing their data has resulted in increased
adoption of the concept of an enterprise data warehouse (EDW).
24
EDW is expected to be a repository of all data in the enterprise, relating to all enterprise applications,
which will allow companies to have a central location for reporting and generating analysis of such data.
EDWs are used by many companies to hold their ERP, CRM, SCM, R&D, and even manufacturing data,
such as inventory, maintenance, purchasing, and so forth, allowing them to generate comprehensive
reports covering all of their enterprise systems.
SSAS cubes can be used as a basis for analysis in other systems, such as SharePoint and Office client
applications, especially Microsoft Excel. Cube structures can be exposed in such systems allowing end
users to pick and choose the measures they want to analyze and the dimensions they want to use to
perform their slicing and dicing. Details of how such cube data can be surfaced in these tools is
discussed later in this paper.
SSAS also offers data mining functionality that allows users to choose from several built-in data mining
algorithms to perform forecasting, data exploration and analysis, and to analyze and determine data
trends. More information about the data mining capabilities of SSAS can be found at:
http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/ssdm/. The data mining features in SSAS are also integrated with
other reporting capabilities, such as SQL Server Reporting Services.
SSAS also provides great extensibility by supporting open standards, such as XMLA (XML for analysis)
and the Multi-Dimensional eXpression (MDX) language for querying against OLAP cube data.
Reporting Services
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a popular tool used by many partners to generate Web-based
reports directly out of their solutions. These reports can also be integrated in SharePoint allowing the
users to view them in their dashboards. SSRS features a robust Report Builder that allows end users to
design their reports without writing any code. With SSRS, both developers and end users can generate
great looking tabular or graphical reports in different forms. Figure 21 shows some of the reports
generated for a chemical company and hosted in a SharePoint dashboard for a plant manager. The
dashboard also shows several Web Parts, each of which pulls data from different sources and aggregates
it in a clear, user-friendly graphical view in the managers dashboard.
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Figure 21 SharePoint dashboard showing several SSRS reports hosted in Web Parts.
Complex Event Processing with SQL Server StreamInsight (SSSI)

SQL Server 2008/R2 features new capabilities for handling complex events. From a manufacturing
perspective, this feature is very useful for processing the huge amounts of data collected on the
production lines and for generating the required events and alerts, before aggregating it in a historian or
other relational databases. Figure 22 shows the SSSI architecture.
26
Figure 22 SSSI architecture.
SSSI is a complex event processing engine that receives events from input adapters. Such events could
represent tag values on the plant floor coming from distributed control systems (DCS) or different
sensors and programmable logic controllers (PLC). SSSI provides excellent extensibility through its tight
integration with Visual Studio, allowing for low-level programming to process the data passing through
it, if needed. The processed data is usually sent through output adapters to certain event targets, which
could be a person's pager or mobile phone, KPI Web Parts on end-user dashboards, or databases that
store the processed data for later use.
One potential use for this technology in the chemical and oil refining industries is processing production
data as it is generated, aggregating the data according to certain rules, and sending the aggregated data
to a cloud-based historian to allow for multi-site visibility into the operations.
Master Data Services (MDS)
Master data is data that is crucial for supporting an organization's main business processes. Master data
is about the objects that are the focus of the organizational activities, not the transactional data itself.
Examples of master data include data about customers, products, cost centers, locations, parts,
equipment, and other assets. This data exists in different forms at each level of an organization, for
example, team, department, division, application, and so forth. This data is relatively slow changing and
shared among multiple contributors and consumers. Again, master data is the object of the transaction,
rather than the transactional data.
SQL Server MDS enables users to manage lists of objects, a powerful capability at different levels in the
organization and in a wide variety of scenarios. It is powerful because it helps overcome the issues
associated with inconsistent master data, which often results in inaccurate reporting and high
operational costs because of poor synchronization of master data changes among different applications.
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MDS follows a self-service approach, empowering end users to create and modify the data in a
controlled and secure way using a Web-based user interface or a Microsoft Excel add-in. This approach
makes it easier for administrators to deploy such data and define and manage data models. Figure 23
shows the main capabilities of MDS.
Figure 23 MDS capabilities.
MDS is very helpful in the following scenarios:
Data management applications. MDS provides storage and management for data and metadata
used as the application knowledge. MDS can provide object mapping, reference data management,
and metadata management. As an example of object mapping, if a chemical company receives
feedstock from two different suppliers and each feedstock comes with different identifiers, MDS will
empower the end user to map these identifiers to a single identity.
Data warehouse and data mart management. MDS empowers end users to manage inconsistent
dimensions to help produce accurate reports of the data marts and avoid stale data.
Operational data management. This capability is extremely important when different systems need
to be integrated, which is a common case in manufacturing organizations where companies acquire
different applications from different vendors that use the same metadata that takes different forms
among these applications. MDS provides a platform for a central schema, integration points, and
validations for solution providers or IT to develop a custom solution to address this issue.
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Microsoft Office Business Intelligence

Microsoft has provided many BI capabilities in its Office client applications, especially Microsoft Excel,
Visio, and Access. The following sections describe how Microsoft Excel and Visio can be used as effective
BI tools that empower end users to perform "self-service" BI through the use of familiar tools and
technologies.
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is an extremely popular program with many professionals, including engineers,
salespeople, marketers, managers, and many others. The ease of use and powerful extensibility features
make it the tool of choice by many engineers and managers in chemical plants and oil refineries. These
people use it to perform calculations, reporting, and data crunching. Many solution providers provide
Excel extensions, such as Excel add-ins, to their applications, allowing data consumed or produced by
these applications to be easily imported from or exported to Excel.
Some of the most important features in Excel that are appealing to people in the chemical industry
include: easy tabulating of data, formatting, charting, and generating new columns based on existing
ones. Excel support for industry standards, such as XML and Web services, also adds more power to end
users, allowing them to bring in data from line-of-business applications or manufacturing applications,
perform calculations using Excel, and generate relevant reports that they can use in their daily work.
In recent years, Excel BI capabilities have grown to include support for KPIs, trends, spark lines,
conditional formatting, heat maps, and many more visual representations of the data. A stand-out
capability is PowerPivot, a free Excel add-in that can be downloaded from this link
(http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/powerpivot-for-microsoft-excel-2010-FX101961857.aspx).
PowerPivot makes it possible to conduct in-depth data analysis within Excel, either stand alone or within
a SharePoint environment. The example in Figure 24 shows production, maintenance, and power
consumption data in a chemical plant visualized using PowerPivot.
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Figure 24 Microsoft Excel PowerPivot used to visualize different data in a chemical plant.
In the right-hand pane of the Excel sheet, an SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cube is shown with its
dimensions and measures. The end user can easily pick any facts and the associated dimensions to slice
and dice the data just like professional analysts do. This feature makes it possible for anyone to conduct
robust and powerful analysis based on their roles and data access privileges.
Another important feature in Excel is its information rights management (IRM) support. This feature
makes it possible to limit access and/or ability to handle files and even data within Excel files to people
with permission to access the data. This is an important feature for the chemical industry to help protect
intellectual property, trade secrets, and other confidential information from unauthorized access.
Microsoft Visio
Microsoft Visio began as a charting and diagramming tool but has evolved to bring numerous powerful
capabilities that can be leveraged people providers software solutions for the chemical and refining
industries. These people include business analysts, system, data, and software architects, project
managers, developers, and even database modelers. Microsoft Visio has added native support to many
software and computer engineering functions, including: UML analysis, website mapping, enterprise
applications, database modeling, program structures, SharePoint workflows, business process
representation, network and system design, and more (for example, see Figure 25.)
30
Figure 25 Microsoft Visio used to plot network diagrams.
Visio is a highly effective tool for business process (BP) modeling and business intelligence. Business
analysts can create BP diagrams that can be imported into other developer-oriented tools, such as
Microsoft BizTalk Server orchestration designer or SharePoint Designer. This process allows developers
and business analysts to collaborate on building the solutions that addresses customer requirements, in
the best way possible.
Data binding of Visio objects along with its tight integration with SharePoint through Visio Services
makes it possible to use Visio as a solid business intelligence tool, either stand alone or in a dashboard
environment (Figure 26). Diagrams can be built to reflect certain processes, such as a series of chemical
processes in a plant. Data from different parts of the process can be visualized on a Visio diagram,
reflecting different metrics directly on the corresponding Visio objects. Visio extensibility allows for
these values to be updated at set intervals or at user request, making it a useful data visualization tool.
31
Figure 26 Microsoft Visio as a data visualization tool, dashboard example.
SharePoint as a BI and Composite Application Platform

BI capabilities have been extended to SharePoint and Office over time to enable presenting reports
generated by Reporting Services or Excel in a portal environment and to allow for quick views of KPIs,
trends, etc.
A key service in SharePoint is PerformancePoint Services (PPS), which used to be a separate product that
allowed end users to create reports with KPIs, drill-through analysis, and trend discovery, among other
features. PPS also allowed integration of these reports in SharePoint. To allow for a better nativedeveloper and end-user experiences, PPS was integrated in SharePoint 2010. PPS brings data together
from different sources, allows for rich visualization of the data with charts and graphs, and allows for
drilling into the data with decomposition trees to find root causes of certain types of events.
Figure 27 shows the PPS dashboard designer, which is used to aggregate data from different sources to
create context-driven dashboards and create-once-and-use-across-multiple-dashboard features, with
one-click deployment using common SharePoint infrastructure. Figure 27 also shows the decomposition
tree that allows for a root-cause analysis of a business question and analysis across different views with
more relevant data visualization. The KPI details report, also shown in Figure 27, displays properties of
each KPI along with tends, actual versus target values, indicators, thresholds, calculation variances,
scoring methods, distribution graphs, and more.
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Figure 27 Different elements of PPS: dashboard designer, decomposition tree, and KPI details report.
SharePoint presents an ideal environment for composite applications that bring together data from
different data sources, which enables integration of these sources at the user interface level. The Web
Part technology discussed about is the key to composite applications. However, it is important to note
the ease with which different technologies and tools can integrate with SharePoint and use the Web
Part technology to present data to the end users, based on their needs. Some of these technologies
have already been mentioned above, such as SSRS, SSAS, SSSI, and even System Center, a tool that will
be discussed below in the infrastructure section. Other products that can also integrate with SharePoint
include BizTalk Server (Business Activity Monitor (BAM)), MDS, and Bing Maps. Solution providers can
also easily extend their applications and surface data, workflows, and functions from these applications
in SharePoint.
SharePoint search is another powerful BI capability and it comes in three options, depending on what
SKU of SharePoint is in use:
Express (basic) search (included in SharePoint Foundation) allows users to search all document
libraries and lists only the current SharePoint server.
Enterprise search (included in SharePoint Standard Edition), allows searching the entire Intranet,
including search for people and expertise.
FAST search (included in SharePoint Enterprise Edition) is a high-end search that provides visual
filtering and highly customizable and advanced content processing, including social search (which is
covered in the collaboration section of this paper). FAST also goes beyond the Intranet and allows
searching data across Internet sites.
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Enhanced Collaboration
Collaboration is another important principle of ChemRA because it allows people to work together more
closely, coordinate their efforts, follow detailed business processes, and respond to events as they
happen. This way of working has become more important in recent years with distributed research and
product development, distributed supply networks, and global customers.
For example, it is increasingly common for chemical companies to have several R&D centersin
different geographical and time zones, with different cultures and languagescollaborate on the
development of a product. Technology plays a crucial role in making this happen. Documents need to be
shared (and maybe translated) in a timely manner among people across these barriers using robust
content management systems. Tele-conferences or video-conferences must allow people to reliably
discuss product development, agree on schedules, tasks, etc. Real-time communication technologies,
such as Skype or Microsoft Lync, can are very helpful for this work. This section describes Microsoft
collaboration offerings and how they relate to the overall reference architecture.
Evolution of Collaboration Technologies
Work habits have evolved with the evolution of collaboration technologies. When phones were the
ruling means of communication, people still needed to work physically close to each other to allow for
interactions, discussions, sharing of documents, etc. With globalization and its intensive needs to allow
people to work in a distributed manner, communication technology was advanced to meet the new
challenges. Evolution of real-time communication networks, Web conferencing, voice over IP (VoIP), and
other technologies allows for people to work and collaborate according to preset business processes
that span different organizational units, and sometimes even different business partners. Some of the
most interesting recent collaboration technologies include social media. These technologies started to
play an important role in different organizations, including chemical and downstream oil and gas ones.
Collaboration services can be divided in three main areas: business process management services,
communication and notification services, and social Web. The following sections discuss these areas and
the Microsoft technologies representing them in some detail.
Business Process Management
Companies in the chemical manufacturing and oil refining industries conduct their business according to
elaborate and highly organized business processes that are designed to maximize worker performance
and productivity while maintaining quality, safety, and regulatory compliance. Technology is used
extensively to do business process modeling and design, create workflows that map to the business
processes, and to generate alerts and notifications as required. Some of the tools offered by Microsoft
for business process modeling and design include SharePoint, BizTalk business process tools, Workflow
Foundation, Microsoft Visio, and Visual Studio 2010.
SharePoint Server
SharePoint Server provides business process management through a number of capabilities, the most
important of which is Workflow Foundation (WF) and enterprise content management (ECM).
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Workflow Foundation
SharePoint brings the power of WF to developers and end users, allowing them to author workflows and
deploy them right into the SharePoint environment. WF is a .NET subsystem that can be used to design
and run different kinds of workflows that map to specific business processes. For example, WF can be
used to design workflows that include long-running steps that could include human and system
interactions. Examples of such interactions include: human approvals of certain steps, processing large
files with checkpoints, and many kinds of background processing, such as sending email alerts,
synchronizing data, and refreshing cache.
Another aspect of WF that make it very appealing for solution development is the ability for end users to
customize workflows designed by integrated service vendors (ISV) to correspond to the solution
business process. Using the re-hostable workflow designer, end users can modify these workflows
without having to recompile them. Users can also customize the activity libraries that ship with the
solutions, to meet their specific needs and use these libraries in future workflow modifications.
WF is usually used in combination with WCF to build composite service oriented applications. The
workflow in these applications is usually an asynchronous process that spans different services and
queues. WF makes it easy to handle coordination among these steps, allowing smoother flow between
these services and queues. For example, controlling robotic equipment on the shop floor might require
different steps. The robot has to be activated and provided with the proper instructions, for example, to
open a valve to let new feed into the chemical process. If an exception happens, an alert must be sent
immediately to the right people and potentially some emergency safety measures need to be taken. If
the job goes as planned, an email could be sent for confirmation or the system database could be
updated. Each one of these steps may represent a service that is called by the workflow steps or data
queued for later processing (such as sending the email confirmation or updating the database).
Figure 28 shows the Workflow Designer and toolbox, showing how easy it is for any user to create
workflows declaratively, without programming. WF is the universal workflow product at Microsoft.
Although BizTalk still has its own workflow engine (BizTalk Orchestration Engine) BizTalk 2010 includes
support for WF workflows. WF is embedded in many other Microsoft products and technologies,
including: Microsoft Office client applications, SharePoint Server, System Center Operations Manager,
Visual Studio, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Dynamics GP, and Dynamics CRM, Windows Server AppFabric,
Project Server, Microsoft Lync, and HPC Server 2008.
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Figure 28 Workflow Designer.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

SharePoint offers excellent content management capabilities, which Gartner ranks among the top
content management systems for vision and ability to execute (Figure 29).
Figure 29 Gartner ranking of ECM systems.
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SharePoint provides many powerful capabilities for ECM, including document set management, a
centralized taxonomy and content types, ability for people to collaborate on authoring and editing
documents, offline access to documents, workflow support for stored documents, and compliance
capabilities. Compliance is enabled through such features as detailed records management, which
enables multi-stage retention, and enhanced editing and reporting capabilities, among others.
BizTalk Server
BizTalk Server offers comprehensive business process management capabilities through the
orchestration engine and designer (Figure 30). Developers can also import workflows designed in
Microsoft Visio and convert them into run-time workflow objects. BizTalk Server also offers other tools,
such as the BizTalk Mapper, which allows document format conversions using standard schemas.
Figure 30 BizTalk Mapper and Orchestration Designer, side by side.
Both of these tools integrate with the Visual Studio development environment, allowing developers to
use the familiar application development tools as they build orchestrations or conduct data
transformations.
BizTalk also includes a robust Rules Engine that allows users to create rules in a natural, English-like
language. BizTalk also offers business process monitoring capabilities through the Business Activity
Monitor (BAM). BAM allows users to track messages as soon as they arrive at the input port and all the
way through the inbound pipes and message box, through the orchestrations, and then to the output
pipes and port. The data associated with the messages can be rendered on the BAM portal or in a
SharePoint dashboard.
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Microsoft Visio
Microsoft Visio was discussed in the BI section. This is just a reminder that Visio also offers excellent
business process modeling capabilities out of the box and integrates with BizTalk and SharePoint in a
way that enhances its business process modeling capabilities.
Communication and Notifications
Collaboration also includes the ability to send and receive notifications and alerts in response to events
that take place in the organization, and the ability to respond to such events. Microsoft provides several
technologies to support these tasks, including Lync Server, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server
Notification Services. The next section expands on Microsoft Lync, a major technology for people to
collaborate using voice, video, and text messaging.
Microsoft Lync
Microsoft Lync is the evolution of Microsoft Office Communication technology and includes a server part
and a client part. Lync technology enables instant messaging and presence capabilities, very effective
features to enhance collaboration among people in and across organizations. Lync also delivers audio
and video Web conferencing as well as enterprise voice and telephony. Lync client is available for
Windows-based computers, Mac computers, and soon for mobile platforms, such as Windows Phone.
Lync provides flexible deployment architectures because it can be deployed on premise or in the cloud.
Cloud deployment can be done as a stand-alone product or as part of Microsoft Office365.
A powerful feature of Lync is the ability to make instant messaging conversations deeply contextual,
which can be done by extending Lync to application functions and screens, or simply by people
communicating with this technology to share desktops or applications on which they can collaborate.
For example, Figure 31 shows a conversation between a shift manager in a chemical plant and a
maintenance operator.
Figure 31 Contextual Lync client screen extending the application to the IM conversation.
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The communicator window includes a rich context that helps with the conversation. The window shows
a picture of the pump that the two people are discussing, along with some relevant KPIs. Also notice
that this conversation was initiated from the shift managers portal, which was possible because of the
integration of Lync and SharePoint. This integration allows for a Web Part, like the one shown in the
figure, to show presence and status of people on the shift managers list of people she or he wants to
communicate with frequently.
Lync provides powerful extensibility. Solution providers can integrate its capabilities, such as presence,
into their applications, portals, or within their Web Parts. Figure 32 shows integration of Lync presence
into a Silverlight Web Part located in a user dashboard.
Figure 32 Integration of Lync into a Silverlight Web Part.
The significance of this example is that it leverages powerful features in the Lync and SharePoint
integration, which allows the SharePoint people search to find the person responsible for maintenance
of the piece of equipment shown in the diagram and present that person's status, allowing for real-time
communication with him or her in several different ways, including instant messaging, voice, and video.
The benefits of such integration in terms of increasing productivity and effective, timely response to
events in the plant are enormous.
Social Web
SharePoint brings many social networking capabilities to the enterprise, many of which can also enhance
collaboration among people in manufacturing operations, supply chain, engineering and R&D, within or
across organizations. Some of the SharePoint social networking capabilities include:
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Team sites for rich team collaboration
Tagging and rating of articles and items on different sites
Bookmarking items for quick access by individuals or other team members
User profiles used by social and expert search to find the right people to address specific issues
My Sites, allowing individuals to establish rich presence on the corporate Intranet complete with
SharePoint capabilities
News feeds
Knowledge mining
Blogs, both personal and team blogs
Enterprise wikis
The social capabilities above help build communities among workers that can be used to exchange
ideas, share experiences, and find people based on the skills published in their profiles. For example,
blogging on an incident in a plant will make information available to other people in different plants,
who can find them through search and benefit from the knowledge. If other people encounter a similar
incident, they can search for information and benefit from colleagues' lessons learned.
Those communities can also be extended to include management, engineers, and researchers, as well as
customers and suppliers, allowing them to serve as channels for sharing experiences, submitting ideas
or product requests, etc.
Social computing is a powerful concept that is beginning to take hold in the manufacturing area. It has
the potential to become more fully used as younger people in the workplace who have grown up with
the technology ascend the management ladder are more open to using these tools in work as well as
personal circumstances.
Microsoft Office365
Office365 is the evolution of Business Process Productivity Suite (BPOS) and includes several products
that enable effective collaboration, among other things, in a cloud environment. The main components
of Office365 are: SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online, Office Web Apps, and Office
Professional Plus for on-premise deployment. This product targets small and midsize businesses as well
as educational institutions. Customers can pick from different plans, which are outside the scope of this
paper. Users of Office365 enjoy many of the same benefits as those using on-premise deployments of
these products and can save substantially on licensing and maintenance.
For example, SharePoint Online has the same collaboration platform as the on-premise SharePoint.
However, SharePoint Online is hosted and managed in Microsoft data centers. SharePoint Online has
deep Office integration, design and development and the on-premise system can be transferred and
deployed online.
Similar comparison between the other server components of Office365 and their on-premise
counterparts shows that the Office365 users enjoy similar benefits as the on-premise users allowing
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them to collaborate at all levels, using text and instant messaging, telephony, voice and video
conferencing, and email.
Solid Infrastructure
The chemical and oil refining facilities are considered critical infrastructures by the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security. Therefore, applications deployed in these organizations require solid, reliable, highly
performing, scalable, and secure infrastructures. Microsoft has been providing such infrastructure to its
hardware and software partners for many years. The following sections describe some of the strategies
and products that Microsoft offers that help ensure meeting these requirements.
Security
End-to-end trust is the Microsoft vision for a safer, more trusted Internet. This vision requires crossindustry collaboration and alignment. There are three main components to end-to-end trust:
Security and privacy fundamentals. These should extend across the secure stack including hardware
(network and devices), software (operating systems and applications), data, and people.
Technology innovations use authentication, authorization, and auditing tools available to ensure
trusted access to assets across the secure stack.
Social, economic, political, and IT alignment.
ChemRA presents this same vision for the chemical manufacturing and oil refining industries to make
sure manufacturing and enterprise networks are well protected.
In 2002, the Trustworthy Computing (TwC) initiative was started by Bill Gates. TwC calls for building
software that is secure by design, secure by default, and secure in deployment (SD3 initiative). This
strategy was supplemented by the defense-in-depth strategy to contain several issues that remained
despite the SD3 initiative.
However, to face the modern security threats, such as spam and phishing, and in some cases targeting
specific applications (which represent attacks up the stack), Microsoft created the concept of a trusted
stack as well as the secure development lifecycle (SDL).
Figure 33 shows the basic components of the trusted stack, which is based on building a secure
foundation through adhering to the secure design lifecycle (SDL), SD3 initiative, defense-in-depth
strategy, as well as threat modeling. The trusted stack is composed of four components: hardware,
software, people, and data. These four components are the ones that need to be protected against any
malicious attacks through identity claims, strong authentication, strict authorization and access control,
and finally auditing to ensure accountability and learning from experiences to avoid any future pitfalls.
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Figure 33 Building the trusted stack.
ChemRA recommends the following for security implementations:
Use data encryption, even when data is at rest in a data store.
Make sure all communications are encrypted and signed.
Sign all service implementations.
Properly encrypt data in transit using transport layer security.
Minimize storage and mapping of personally identifiable information.
Use the SDL in all software development and demand that your software partners also adopt it using
it as a general practice.
Some of the tools used to achieve the goals of end-to-end trust include:
Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS).
ForeFront protection for SharePoint as well as inherent security features in SharePoint and SQL
Server.
Active Directory Domain Service (ADDS).
Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS).
Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM).
BitLocker drive encryption for Windows 7, Vista, and 2008 Server.
Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), Internet Information Services (IIS), and Visual Studio and .NET.
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Microsoft Forefront tools and technologies for protecting the edge and server.
Network Access Protocol (NAP).
Universal Application Gateway (UAG).
IPsec.
Systems Management: System Center

System Center solutions help IT professionals manage all physical and virtual IT assets across data
centers, client computers, and devices. System Center provides a set of integrated and automated
management solutions that allow IT professionals to be more productive service providers for the
businesses. System Center solutions are knowledge-driven management solutions. As IT managers use
these solutions, information about systems, policies, processes, and best practices is captured and
aggregated. This rapidly brings value in the form of optimizing the infrastructure, reducing costs,
improving application availability, and enhancing service delivery.
In chemical and oil refining facilities, System Center can be used to manage all IT assets in these facilities
as well as any devices used for data collection, monitoring, alerting, etc. For example, Microsoft
Operations Manager (MOM) can be used to provide consistent views in the operation of such devices,
their health and performance. System Center Configuration Manager (SSCM) can also be used to control
software provisioning, update and patch management of servers, client computers, or devices in a way
that does not interfere with the operations in the plant.
System Center has several components, the most important of which are System Center Configuration
Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manger (SCOM). Other components include System
Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), and System
Center Service Manager.
System Center Operations Manager (SSCM)
SCCM is used to perform comprehensive assessment, deployment, and update of server, client
computers, and devices across physical, virtual, and mobile environments. Although it is optimized for
Windows, SCCM is extensible and presents the best way to get insight into and control over IT systems.
The upcoming release of SCCM 2012 will extend the benefits of managing IT assets in the enterprise to
the consumer devices, bringing consistent rich user experience across both corporate and consumer
devices while ensuring proper protection of corporate assets. SCCM includes these capabilities:
Asset intelligence
Software update management
Desired configuration management
Software distribution
Operating system deployment
Remote PC diagnostics and repair
User rights for System Center Mobile Device Manager

43
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

SCOM provides in-depth visibility into the health, performance, and availability of applications,
operating systems, hypervisors, and hardware deployed in a data center, all through a single, familiar
and easy-to-use interface. Operations Manager offers world-class monitoring for Windows-based
environments while providing excellent support for heterogeneous environments, including various
distributions of Linux/Unix and Sun Solaris. Additionally, through the Windows Azure Application
Monitoring Management Pack, you can also monitor Windows Azure applications using your familiar onpremises Operations Manager investments. Operations Manager also offers easy-to-use reporting and
authoring capabilities to track performance against service level agreements (SLA).
SCOM comes with several solution accelerators, one of which is an IT compliance Management Guide
that shows how to configure Microsoft products to address specific IT governance, risk, and compliance
(GRC) requirements. Use of these solutions can help chemical plants and oil refineries as they configure
Microsoft technologies in their environments to address such GRC requirements. SCOM delivers the
following key capabilities:
Windows Azure application monitoring
Highly scalable and flexible architecture
Built-in security capabilities
Integrated, updatable monitoring capabilities
Monitoring service levels against targets
Extensive in-depth reporting
Powerful extensibility and customization capabilities
Flexible notification infrastructure
Interoperability and automation
Virtualization
Virtualization is a platform technology that successfully addresses many challenges. As different
applications are deployed in a chemical or oil and gas organization, each application has its own
requirements in terms of memory, dependencies, processing needs, storage, management, etc. Such
applications might cause conflicts and may end up deployed on many physical servers as a result. Also,
these applications have special needs during development and testing that make it important to
leverage virtualization.
Virtualization is an abstraction of some of the layers on the servers or client machines. Depending on the
level of abstraction, virtualization can be classified as follows:
Server
Desktop
Storage
Network
44
Application
Presentation
To address potential future needs and minimize risk, it is common to oversize deployment footprints in
regular situations. The cost of additional assets used in the process can add up along with the cost of
maintaining such assets and powering them. Virtualization, not only significantly reduces these costs
and risks, but it also v reduces the management effort of such assets.
Hyper-V
Server virtualization is used widely for server consolidation and helps maximize machine utilization.
Hyper-V is Microsoft's server virtualization technology. Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008 and
comes with a virtual profile option where the only service activated on the server besides the basic
kernel services is Hyper-V.
Some of the key features of Hyper-V include:
Dynamic memory allows for better utilization of how memory is distributed across hosted virtual
machines in response to changing workloads on these machines.
Live migration allows for moving running virtual machines between physical servers.
Support for up to 64 logical processors.
Cluster shared volumes to enhance shared storage use.
Cluster node connectivity fault tolerance.
Enhanced cluster validation tool includes best practice analyzer (BPA).
Virtual machine snapshot allows for easily reverting to previous states.
Network load balancing (NLB).
Wide support for server platforms, including 32 bit and 64 bit Windows, Linux, and others.
Dynamic VM storage.
Extensibility.
App-V
App-V is an application virtualization technology that allows users to launch applications and run them
on their machines without being installed. Users can run multiple versions of a particular application
side by side with no conflicts. This scenario is helpful if a customer is using a desktop application from a
solution provider and needs to run an older version of the solution on the same machine. This could be
for testing purposes, or maybe to handle old data files that can only be processed in the old version of
the solution.
With App-V, a virtualized application is encapsulated in its own shield and protected from the
operating system it is running on and from other applications running as well. At the same time, the
application can access certain resources on the host machine, such as file system, print services,
network services, etc. through special ports. Figure 34 demonstrates this concept showing two
45
applications running side by side on a host client machine. The interaction between these applications is
rather indirect, taking place through their access to common resources on the host.
Figure 34 App-V keeps each virtualized application within its separate shield with access to common resources.
App-V is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which includes, in addition to App-V,
the following components:
Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT)
Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM)
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service (AIS)
For more details on MDOP, including App-V, visit this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/mdop/default.aspx
High Performance Computing
High performance computing (HPC) gives engineers and analysts the computational resources needed to
make better decisions, accelerate innovation and product development, and speed time to market. One
of the most obvious applications of HPC in the chemical and oil refining industries is conducting
modeling and optimizations, activities that usually require vast amounts of processing. For example,
supply chain optimization requires handling data from many sources internal and external to the
enterprise. HPC can be used to significantly cut the time needed to perform these activities. Product
design (research and development) could also benefit from use of HPC.
HPC is based on Windows Server and an added package, the HPC pack. Figure 35 shows the basic
architecture of HPC.
46
Figure 35 Basic architecture of Microsoft high performance computing.
The architecture has the following components:
Head node performs management job scheduling for the cluster.
Compute node performs computational tasks assigned to it by the scheduler.
Job scheduler queues jobs and their associated tasks, allocates resources for these jobs, initiates the
tasks on the compute node, and monitors the status of the jobs.
Broker node is an intermediary between the application and the HPC services.
47
Conclusion
This white paper presented different Microsoft technologies and showed how they satisfy different
principles of ChemRA. Some of these technologies address one of the principles, such as Silverlight or
HTML5 addressing user experience, and others address multiple principles. As an example, SharePoint
addresses user experience through its Web Part technology, interoperability through Business
Connectivity Services (BCS) and Duet, and business insight thought its composite application
architecture and other services, such PerformancePoint Services (PPS) and Excel Services.
Microsoft partners who provide solutions to the chemical and downstream oil and gas industries can use
some or all of these technologies to build their applications. With the ChemRA initiative, Microsoft and
its partners will address certain specific scenarios and provide best practices and guidance on how the
technologies presented in this paper can be configured to provide the optimal design for that scenario.
ChemRA is an on-going initiative that will be advanced by Microsoft, its partners, and customers that
want to participate.
48
Appendix A: Partner Proof Points

This section presents some partner profiles and solutions that are built using Microsoft technologies and
it shows how many of these solutions already adhere to the ChemRA principles. These partners are
some of the leading companies that have been providing rich solutions to the chemical and oil refining
industries for several decades.
Accenture
Business challenge
Companies that own and operate plants and equipment are under relentless pressure to increase the
performance and reliability of their fleet and assets, while reducing spending.
Whether to respond to shareholder demands for increased profitability, client demands for high plant
availability and reliability, a more arduous and changing regulatory environment, demands for increased
visibility around health and safety issues or to tackle increased market competition and consolidation,
the pressure is on to make assets yield more. At the same time, reducing operations and maintenance
cost and capital spend on new and replacement equipment is an equally pressing imperative.
Efforts to respond to these challenges can be further complicated by: an aging workforce limiting access
to equipment experts, aging physical assets, distributed and disjointed information, a lack of effective
communication and collaboration tools, difficulty in implementing predictive maintenance strategies,
and minimal knowledge management capabilities.
The opportunity: Making the I and T work together
Forward-looking organizations are assessing the game-changing potential of cloud technology to tackle
these challenges. The cloud is offering the opportunity to drive down the drag on organizational agility,
and helping businesses operate exponentially faster and cheaper and tap into dormant organizational
data.
By providing the means to integrate critical asset and equipment real-time information in one place, the
cloud is giving decision-makers the information and tools they need to quickly, effectively and
efficiently:
Monitor, manage, and improve day-to-day operations.
Improve the ability to predict and plan maintenance.
Deliver critical asset information to all levels of the organization.
Execute quicker and better informed decisions.
Achieve high performance and reliability of enterprise assets.
Resurrect return on investment on existing IT.
49
The Solution: Accenture Plant Performance Solution

Accenture, Avanade, and Microsoft are providing the business, technology, and implementation
expertise to help chemical, as well as oil and gas, utilities, and natural resources companies manage
their vast plant resources more efficiently. They are doing this by helping organizations to reduce costs,
increase return on current assets, and extract longer life out of investments in the field.
A cloud-based asset using Microsofts SharePoint the Accenture Plant Performance Solution provides an
integrated portal that brings together real-time analytics, applications, and processes to make it far
easier than ever before to:
Integrate information from plant and corporate systems.
Drill down from fleet to component using familiar hierarchies.
Deliver the information tailored to user role and function, accessible from any geography through
mobile devices.
Collaborate with others in the organization and document processes and information sources.
Link historical information to real-time performance.
Create and manage equipment and operational alarms.
Use tools to do advanced analysis leveraging asset information.
The Benefits: Creating a Real-Time Enterprise

Leveraging what most clients already have in abundance but have struggled to orchestrate effectively,
the Accenture Plant Performance Solution is tightly focused on facilitating return on investment on
clients existing IT and data so that they can get more out of their plants and equipment. Delivering an
information and collaboration hub to optimize core plant operational capabilities means integrating a
typically complex, diverseand oftentimesunique suite of client systems, applications, and processes
in a way that makes the whole much greater than the sum of its parts (Figure 36).
50
Figure 36 Putting information and technology together intelligently.
Having this essential information aggregated in one place, means being able to strategically manage
assets with elevated knowledge about overall plant performance. And a common information platform
that integrates point solutions into a single view and extends usability for non-power users drives up
return on capital investment. Asset downtime and associated maintenance costs can be managed more
effectively with detailed data on equipment reliability, real-time performance, and work history.
51
Figure 37 Users leverage common information tailored to their specific roles, connecting people, information, and
workflows.
With a single sign-on and password, this process-driven, portal view of critical plant and asset
information enables clients to strategically manage their assets (Figure 37). They are able to collaborate
with more robust knowledge about overall plant performance and optimize capital spending using
readily available equipment, health, and market data to aid planning and prioritization. Integrated realtime analytics detect process exceptions early, so events can be proactively managed to prevent
unplanned equipment failures and minimize risks. Immediate access to expert networks helps drive
collaboration and gets the right people involved up front, while built-in workflows connect people and
tasks to resolve issues efficiently.
Using the latest proven technologies, the Accenture Plant Performance Solution is the gateway to
improved plant performance.
52
AspenTech
Globalization, specialization, and market shifts have changed the competitive landscape in the process
industries. Energy, chemicals, power and other process industry companies know that they must deploy
technology to make better decisions, faster. Better decisionsmade in their supply chains, at the
corporate level and ultimately at the operator level in each of their plantsplay a role in improving the
agility needed to remain competitive.
Whether that is optimizing an existing process to achieve incremental capacity or efficiency, innovating
a new product to secure a new customer, or collaborating across traditional operational silos to make
faster decisions, companies turn to AspenTech to help them secure their position in the process
industry.
AspenTech is the largest software company focused exclusively on the process industries. Our software
is specifically tuned to process industry requirements, incorporating empirical models of manufacturing
and planning processes, and reflecting the deep domain expertise we have amassed from focusing on
process manufacturing solutions for more than 30 years.
The worlds leading process industry companies know that to truly run their plants and assets efficiently
and optimally, you must use process models and data to drive operational excellence. Each process
generates a significant volume of data, and collecting, storing, visualizing, and analyzing this data
provides insight into operations. The combination of process data and process models provides a deeper
understanding of the whole process and helps to uncover opportunities for process improvements and,
therefore, improved competitiveness.
By capturing process data, a process historian can not only provide insight into current and historical
performance, but it also acts as an application platform for converting data into actionable information.
Process models also augment data by providing a deeper understanding of the behavior of the process.
A number of key applications embed process models including planning, scheduling, production
accounting, and advanced process control. Models enable management and automation of important
value-adding business processes such as:
Crude oil feedstock selection.
Scheduling of an optimal operations plan taking account of operating constraints.
Maintaining a process unit at economically optimum operating targets in the face of operating
disturbances.
Maximizing operational performance while minimizing energy costs.
These are just some of the many examples of process optimization. More than 1,500 process industry
companies optimize a wide range of manufacturing, supply chain, and engineering operations every day,
using AspenTech softwareimproving competitiveness and profitability by increasing throughput and
productivity, reducing operating costs, enhancing capital efficiency, and decreasing working capital
requirements.
53
Process Optimization with aspenONE

For years, Microsoft technology has underpinned AspenTechs process optimization solutions. Recent
Microsoft developments have made it easier to integrate applications, to deliver new approaches to
collaboration, more powerful analytics and to provide richer and more intuitive user interfaces, all
further enhancing AspenTechs industry-leading process optimization suite, aspenONE (Figure 38).
Figure 38 AspenTechs industry-leading process optimization suite, aspenONE.
aspenONE delivers an integrated foundation for managing market volatility and reducing costs while
increasing capacity and improving margins. It enables standardized work processes and real-time
decisions based on common data, models, and assumptions.
With aspenONE, companies can more effectively:
Optimize selection and scheduling of feedstock applying actual refinery constraints.
Drive collaboration across engineering, operations, and the entire supply chain.
Optimize asset or plant performance given the trade-offs between capacity, yield, and energy.
Reduce the gap between plan vs. actual.
Increase speed of response and decision making.
To achieve these benefits, the worlds leading process industry companies are deploying AspenTech
solutions, such as:
Aspen PIMS and Aspen Petroleum Scheduler:

o
Optimizes selection and scheduling of feedstock.

54
o
o
o
Aspen DMCplus for Advanced Process Control:

o
o
o
o
o
Aligns inventory to production and identifies viable scheduling alternatives.

Reduces blend recipe and blend quality giveaways.
Improves reliability through sharing of common models.
Drives and maintains processes at optimally determined targets.
Increases yields by safely pushing processes closer to their limits.
Improves the accuracy of process models.
Enables process control on the largest and smallest units.
Shortens step testing time by nearly 50%; reduces product quality variation.
Aspen IP.21 for Process Information Management (historian) and Process Application Platforms:
o
o
o
o
o
Standardizes work processes for increased efficiency and productivity.

Improves decision making by providing real-time access to production information and the cost
of KPI non-compliance.
Monitors plant/asset inventory to improve operational visibility.
Supports ongoing regulatory compliance.
Ensures more agile and responsive order focused operations with improved metrics through
integration with third-party systems (ERP, DCS, etc.).
Benefits Delivered by aspenONE Support of Microsoft Technology and ChemRA

The power of aspenONE is not just the economic value delivered by these core applications but also the
benefits derived from synergies between the applications. The ability to see models in operations
provides operators with a better understanding of the process and where opportunities for
improvement might be. Underpinning all of these solutions is the Microsoft technology. Microsoft is the
key infrastructure for aspenONE, supporting interoperability, application synergies, and the liberation of
important decision support information from core applications.
By collaborating on the Chemicals and Refining Reference Architecture Initiative (ChemRA), AspenTech
is further aligning our technology with Microsoft. By employing Microsoft technologies such as
SharePoint Web Parts for visualization and Web Services as a standard approach for integration, we are
delivering applications that are more intuitive and accessible to a broader range of users.
SharePoint provides a key collaboration platform for aspenONE applications. Many customers have
adopted SharePoint, and aspenONE delivers Web content to the SharePoint environment while
taking advantage of SharePoints support for enhanced collaboration. Content can be structured to
support different operational roles.
Web Services. aspenONE exploits Web services to connect applications and to support third-party
integration.
SQL Server. A number of the core aspenONE applications embed SQL Server, which enables them to
take advantage of the powerful analytics that this platform provides. aspenONE also enables users
to inter-relate analytics from different applications in powerful Business Intelligence solutions
(Figure 39).
55
Figure 39 Microsoft technology helps aspenONE provide powerful capabilities, such as business intelligence reports from
multiple sources.
AspenTech is continually enhancing aspenONE to enrich customer decision-support capabilities.

Recently, for example, mobile support has been added to our Aspen IP.21 historian and our Aspen
Properties engineering solution.
All of these efforts further our commitment to deliver leading solutions that help our customers in the
process industries achieve superior financial and operating results.
56
Invensys Operations Management

Invensys Operations Management is involved in the ChemRA Initiative because we serve 47 of the top
50 Chemical companies, 23 of the top 25 Petroleum companies, and 19 of the top Pharmaceutical
companies, so these process industries are very important to us. Many of the world's largest refineries,
heavy oil upgraders, and petrochemical plants use Invensys solutions to improve and sustain increased
performance, as well as to bring about a cultural change that shifts the focus towards being proactive
about increasing safety, efficiency, and production.
One of the key challenges in meeting these objectives is to easily integrate many disparate legacy and
new systems using a common software architecture that provides horizontal and vertical integration.
This integration needs to be inclusive of all business and plant systems, and must provide application
interoperability, scalability, common security, solution standardization, unified communications,
intuitive and consolidated user interfaces, and simplification. At Invensys, we have been jointly
developing our core software offerings and architectural roadmaps with Microsoft for over two decades,
and our mutual customers have been able to successfully link their plant and business systems for
increased business performance.
The ChemRA initiative is aligned with the further acceleration of these goals and provides a common
understanding of these challenges, along with prescriptive software architecture guidance and product
direction. This effort is completely synergistic with our direction in the specific areas of: enterprise bus,
workflow, and smart clients (using HTML5, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, etc.).
Invensys is focused on helping our customers to achieve Operational Excellenceby helping them excel
in four key areas: control, environment & safety, assets, and most importantly people. ChemRA provides
the guidance and technology answers that address customers Operational Excellence challenges and
key business drivers.
Key market transitions within the process industries are underwayfrom knowledge management to
empowering people; process management to product & brand management; transactional business to
real-time business; rigid operations to agile operations; from large central plants to many small plants
acting as one. New, contemporary architectures like ChemRA provide the flexibility in addressing the
above transitions. Ultimately, ChemRA will help vendors to address the key business drivers of their
customer base, such as reducing total cost of ownership, asset life extension, increasing value,
simplification and solution standardization.
57
Figure 40 InFusion is the Invensys delivery mechanism for Enterprise Control, and the vehicle for the journey towards
business optimization and operational excellence.
58

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Microsoft Implementation of the

Chemical Reference Architecture

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

High Performance Computing............................................................................................................. 46

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Technology Mapped to the ChemRA Principles

Natural User Experience (See page 4.)

Application Interoperability (See page 12.)

Business Insight (See page 22.)

Enhanced Collaboration (See page 34.)

Solid Infrastructure (See page 41.)

Figure 1 Key Microsoft technologies that can be used in ChemRA

Natural User Experience

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 3 Architecture of PivotViewer Silverlight control with an example.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 4 HTML5 validation support in Visual Studio 2010/SP1.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

SharePoint and ASP.Net Web Parts

Figure 5 Microsoft SharePoint Server capabilities.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 6 Executive dashboard created using SharePoint Web Parts.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Office Client Products

Figure 7 WPF architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Control cameras or inspection devices remotely in a chemically hazardous area.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 8 Windows Phone platform architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 9 WCF high level architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 10 BizTalk high level architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

WCF Web service to communicate with standard Tech XML sources.

Figure 11 Architecture of the Manufacturing Toolkit for BizTalk Server.

Windows Server AppFabric

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 12 Windows Azure platform architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 13 Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus architecture.

Figure 14 Components of the Windows Azure OS.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

These components include the following:

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 17 Duet Enterprise architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 18 Business intelligence leaders according to Gartner.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 19 The Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

SQL Server Business Intelligence

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Functional Data Marts

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Complex Event Processing with SQL Server StreamInsight (SSSI)

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 22 SSSI architecture.

Microsoft Implementation of ChemRA

Figure 23 MDS capabilities.