| A | Without going into excruciating detail, the answer is a resounding "yes." You can integrate OSIsoft's PI with xMII, as xMII provides you with the ability to extract data from the historian. A bit clunky, as you might imagine with the extraction of time series data by what is essentially a scripting tool, but if your goal is to get the data out, it can most definitely be done.
What is xMII? xMII is actually the synthesis of two products that were developed, marketed, and sold by a company named Lighthammer. Lighthammer was purchased by SAP a couple of years ago — the product have been enhanced since then and rebranded under the xMII (Manufacturing Intelligence and Integration) moniker. xMII is not so much a product as a toolset that offers some very useful functionality, particularly when it comes to joining applications in the real-time environment with SAP.
xMII provides a layer of abstraction between the data that you're collecting on the shop floor, the transactions you populate with that data, and SAP. It buffers you from the details of XI, BAPIs, RP(F)Cs, and all of the other various integration avenues available to you as a user of SAP. That's on the SAP-facing side. xMII also provides a comprehensive set of connectors to multiple data sources (shop floor devices, relational databases, historians, the users themselves, etc.), which makes it relatively easy to capture information from the "real time" environment for the purposes of display, or to combine information from the real-time environment with data from transactional systems to create composite values, and/or composite views of that information. Moreover, you can create business "rules" within xMII, and hence set up workflows that move information between the various applications and/or data sources that you are interacting with (SAP will likely be one of them). As such, you can create new purpose-built "composite applications" by weaving together snippets of data and functionality from the other apps in your environment.
While xMII is evolving, it is still predominantly a toolkit, albeit one that offers very nice visual tools and graphic UI development capabilities. At this time, the onus is still on the users to set up a governance strategy with respect to the development, deployment, version control, and configuration management aspects of their xMII deployments.
Hope this helps.
Alison |