Assai Acquires Viewport.ai As Race For AI-Driven Engineering Document Management Intensifies
Assai Acquires Viewport.ai As Race For AI-Driven Engineering Document Management Intensifies
On November 27, 2024, engineering document management and control solutions provider Assai Software Services announced the acquisition of Viewport.ai, an Amsterdam-based provider of AI-driven industrial data and knowledge management software. This move provides a compelling addition to Assai Software Services’s unstructured data management capabilities, delivering better search and cross-referencing functions across technical documentation and bringing the provider firmly into the growing crowd of software vendors building practical AI-powered solutions for asset-heavy industries.
Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Culemborg, Netherlands, Assai Software Services (Assai) specializes in document control and management for industries such as energy, construction and utilities. Its SaaS document management system (DMS) – Assai Document Management – delivers document workflows, automated email reminders, drill-down search, and integrations with third-party information management and DMSs from AVEVA, Hexagon, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. With offices in the US, UAE, Malaysia and India, Assai has built a global presence by streamlining engineering projects and operations.
Meanwhile, Viewport.ai (Viewport), founded in 2010, brings a considerable AI and machine learning (ML) lean to Assai. Its solution offers optical character recognition (OCR) for digitizing scanned and even handwritten legacy documents – such as piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) – and automatically cross-referencing data across technical documents, P&IDs and time series. Viewport delivers pre-built connectors to enterprise content management (ECM) tools, like OpenText xECM and Accruent’s Meridian, enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, like IFS Ultimo, and permit to work (PTW) solution Yokogawa RAP.
Hand-in-glove, the acquisition combines Assai’s document control with Viewport’s established AI-driven data discovery and enrichment capabilities – the latter of which has already been implemented at more than 400 operational sites across Europe, including firms like TenneT and Spirit Energy. Assuming integration of the two vendors’ tech stacks is executed, Assai plans to offer its expanded customer base a more unified platform for managing unstructured industrial data, such as engineering documentation.
Verdantix sees technical documentation as one of the two types of largely untapped industrial data sources (PDFs and spreadsheets) for use in automated information management systems – such as knowledge graphs.
At first, Assai’s new acquisition will bring better search in-house and improve data quality through cross-referencing. But this acquisition also reflects broader market trends. As data volumes grow across not only operational technology (OT) data like time series, but also across unstructured sources such as documentation, industrial firms have no choice but to use increasingly more sophisticated AI tools to understand data across modalities. Such systems add structure and metadata, automating some of the curation of data to turn it into useful information. The 2024 global corporate survey of 304 industrial transformation practitioners revealed 75% say poor quality or incomplete data is a ‘very significant’ or ‘significant’ barrier to the success of AI analytics projects. Compounding this, unstructured data management is a capability currently offered by very few industrial software vendors. Assai’s acquisition of Viewport is a welcome step for industrial firms – and new potential partners – looking to tap into and cross-reference more of their data.
Assai plans to integrate Viewport’s capabilities into its SaaS platform to create a comprehensive solution for curation of such data – positioning the new amalgamation as a strong competitor to the OT- and ET-focused vendors assessed in the upcoming Green Quadrant on industrial data management solutions.
To read more, check out Verdantix Viewport.ai Delivers A Knowledge Management System With Rich Integrations For European Energy Firms.