A Robust Data Fabric Is Essential for Deploying Next-Gen Technologies like AI, and Emerson Is Delivering This Architecture to TotalEnergies Through AspenTech Inmation

In late July 2025, Emerson announced a strategic collaboration with TotalEnergies to empower its data fabric and management across enterprise operations to support the adoption of next-generation technologies. TotalEnergies will deploy Emerson’s AspenTech Inmation platform at all sites, constructing an encompassing data fabric to facilitate and centralize real-time data collection. Through this improved data architecture, the company can improve decision-making, deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered applications to optimize processes and performance, and ensure secure and easy data access organization-wide.

The rollout is expected to be done over a 2-year period. This deployment shows fruit from the full AspenTech acquisition by Emerson (completed January 2025), with action on the vision deepening the vendors’ capabilities in data management, analytics, and AI (see further coverage of the acquisition in this ABI Insight, “Emerson to Buy Remaining Shares of AspenTech for US$7.2 Billion, Allowing Emerson to More Effectively Compete in the Manufacturing Digital Transformation Space”).

The AspenTech Inmation technology is being leveraged as part of Emerson’s Project Beyond, an initiative announced in 2025 to drive an evolution in industrial automation through a software-defined, Operational Technology (OT)-ready enterprise operations platform.

AspenTech’s Inmation data integration and management platform is a powerful tool to support manufacturers’ digital transformation projects and build an industrial data fabric. The solution helps to drive data collection and contextualization at scale, allowing for easy access to data, by drawing in data from systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Distributed Control System (DCS), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), process historians, and connected assets into a centrally managed environment, providing a foundation to support the use of tools such as AI-powered predictive analytics, digital twin construction, and robust Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) analysis. All of this serves to allow manufacturers to optimize processes and drive informed decision-making easily.

The Inmation platform provides comprehensive Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) integration to manufacturers’ existing infrastructure, allowing the platform to easily plug into operations and rapidly access data, enabling easy scaling and quick time to value. All of this is supported by strong cybersecurity functionality. This includes data encryption at rest and in transit, and comprehensive permission and authentication requirements, ensuring that manufacturers can access their data while keeping it secure. Security is a critical concern to manufacturers as operations become increasingly connected.

In ABI Research’s most recent Industrial & Manufacturing Survey (PT-3657), manufacturers ranked “improving cybersecurity posture” as the most important investment area over the next 12 months.  This demonstrates how essential it is for technology platforms to not only demonstrate resilient cybersecurity capabilities, but also aid manufacturers in building a more secure system holistically.

While the solution brings several benefits, manufacturers must face the challenges of adopting and implementing a new technology system, which often results in higher than ideal Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and robust change management processes. Implementing the system and data connections will still require strong domain expertise and data management skills among workforces, or require notable System Integrator (SI) support, and such skillsets are even more hotly contested as the industry moves into an AI-driven world. Furthermore, training for users on the new system will take time, and overcoming resistance to new technology is always a complexity to account for. Manufacturers must be willing to invest in new technology and move past pilots to see the value of a platform such as Inmation, something that is discovered with deployment at scale.

Access and utilization of data are paramount for manufacturers looking to retain competitiveness in the coming years. Industrial environments will generate over 4.4 Zettabytes of data annually by 2030; however, less than 5% of data is currently utilized. ABI Research’s survey highlights the difficulty of achieving secure access to these data and using them to power new technologies. When asked what the key business challenges they are facing, respondents ranked deployment of new technologies and cybersecurity risks as the top two issues.

Creating a robust and secure data architecture is critical if manufacturers want to leverage next-generation technologies such as AI and digital twins, and platforms such as AspenTech Inmation are key to efficiently achieving such adoption and transformation at scale, as it effectively streamlines the data acquisition, contextualization, and dissemination process. The platform ensures consistency across manufacturers’ data sources, breaking down silos that are commonplace in large-scale industrial operations and driving strong Information Technology/Operational Technology (IT/OT) alignment. If large industrial companies have not deployed a similar solution yet, they should consider using such centralized platforms to support digital transformation initiatives, analytics, and the adoption of new technology.

Other notable offerings that support manufacturers’ construction of robust data fabrics are Cognite Data Fusion, IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data, Microsoft Fabric, and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Industrial Data Fabric solution. These vendors are seen as having the inside track on supporting data fabric and data management solutions with their wide scope of resources, support, and IT specialism. However, with AspenTech Inmation platform, Emerson shows that traditional OT solution providers are more than capable of leveraging deep industry expertise and process understanding to meet the IT/OT convergence needs sought by major industrial companies. Providers of industrial DataOps solutions such as HighByte and Litmus can empower data fabric deployment, augment IT and OT vendor-driven solutions, and support deep data connectivity, integration, and data contextualization.

As labor markets become increasingly tighter and access to both IT and OT skillsets becomes more challenging, companies will need to progressively rely more on technology vendors such as Emerson to develop, deploy, and manage data collection platforms and projects. While manufacturers can choose to attempt to tackle this challenge in-house and develop integrations and workarounds to connect operations, AspenTech Inmation can provide a simplified, efficient, and scalable way to construct a robust data fabric, and major industry players such as TotalEnergies are recognizing the value of these vendor-led options.