Rick Franzosa and I recently had the opportunity to attend the Proficy Accelerate User Conference. This customer conference, already planned for the Proficy® from Velotic™ community, was the first since the formation of Velotic. Less than two months into being a new company, the event showcased not only the latest from Proficy but also the Kepware® from Velotic™ and ThingWorx® from Velotic™ suites in demo booths. Implementation and reseller partners were also there in force.
Velotic Vision
Brian Shepherd, Velotic Software CEO, kicked off the event by explaining their clarity of purpose: helping producers “do the right thing right.” Their tag line is “Build Brighter.” He pointed out that it has 1,200 employees across 27 countries, over 150 partners, and $350M in revenue. Making a fresh start across all three product suites is crucial, as both GE Vernova and PTC had other main focus areas.
So far, investor TPG appears to be ready to invest aggressively in Velotic’s people, processes, and technology. The technology investments are aimed at improving each product and integrating them effectively to make them easier to use and deploy. They will also be infusing AI throughout the products for both augmented and autonomous operations. He hinted at an interest in growing the functional footprint to serve other problems as well.
Customer Examples
Several customer speakers from the Food industry highlighted their successes using Proficy Smart Factory Cloud MES.
- Papa John’s has rolled it out across 11 pizza dough production sites in less than three years, moving from paper and artisanal approaches. Along with partner GrayMatter, they got the first two sites done in a year each. Subsequent sites went live in as little as three weeks as they systematized the deployments. Results included half the time for an audit, no waste, optimized yield, much higher labor efficiency, and greater visibility, moving from once-a-day data gathering to twice an hour.
- Sargento has been working with Proficy and INS3 for nearly 20 years and discussed how to govern data and achieve faster time-to-value. Their OEE went up due to higher speed, less overpack, and less downtime. They can now answer questions instantly using a Unified Name Space (UNS) as an early adopter of the Data Hub. They plan to add autonomous mobile robots and continue analyzing and eliminating microstops.
Data Management
Perhaps the biggest news at the event was the unveiling of Proficy Data Hub, due out in full production release in calendar Q3 of 2026. Data Hub is the foundation for industrial DataOps and data fabric. While the Proficy Operations Hub delivers the user experience and visualization, the Data Hub creates a unified namespace (UNS) around an asset model. The Data Hub composable framework is intended to help customers achieve faster time-to-value and quicker decision-making.
Brian Johnson, product manager for both Data Hub and Historian, points out that this overarching data model or fabric spanning all Proficy products is a long-anticipated advancement. Each Proficy product (Historian, SCADA, MES) has its own data model, and the Data Hub pulls them all into a single model. This enables users to better leverage all of them without needing to know where the data resides.
Since the Velotic Proficy portfolio includes a Historian, SCADA, and MES, and they integrate with ERP and other systems, there is already context and governance to a certain extent. The Data Hub becomes a single, back-end source to integrate data from across the plant and the enterprise. Companies can connect just once and reuse those. MCP helps to abstract the user experience from source understanding. We expect the ThingWorx ThingModel to play a role in the Data Hub as well, but that’s still in the works.
Historian is the default time-series data storage system for the portfolio. This year, they are also launching a Hyper Scale Cloud Historian that runs natively on AWS. This scalable microservices historian will enable one billion samples per minute. This is three orders of magnitude faster than the current version, and will be useful in industries such as the electric grid. AI is also coming into Historian for natural language queries.
MES Next Steps
Velotic is weaving AI into the Proficy Smart Factory MES and the entire Plant Apps suite. What we saw in action was the natural language interface. The MES context helps deliver good data for AI to leverage. The demonstration also showed how the new Data Hub can pull data from many sources to answer complex questions through that natural language interface.
There is also a major industry-specific release in the works for discrete assembly, Proficy for Assembly Operations. Until now, the automotive industry has primarily used level 2 Proficy products. This MES is being co-developed with major automotive customers to meet their specific requirements. In an automotive environment, MES does not actually ‘execute’. Execution occurs at the SCADA or PLC level. For this reason, level 2 and level 3 systems are tightly linked to perform their functions. Proficy for Assembly Operations is designed to address the high-speed, complex-model-mix discrete market, using a model-driven approach to configuration, execution, and data collection, with a cloud-native, 100% web-based UI.
AI Initiatives
Velotic demonstrated chat-based capabilities with Proficy Smart Factory MES, and have a series of other AI enhancements, including a GraphQL API that enables AI through Model Context Protocol (MCP), a natural language chat interface just like the frontier models, multi-tenant, multi-user Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Velotic is also planning to include conversation history and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) stores to house additional searchable context. These capabilities are targeted for release in August 2026.
Our Take
Velotic is coming together in a way that matches its name – with velocity and agentic capabilities across the portfolio. Velotic branding and websites should be ready by the end of the year. Seeing some of the people from each of the three product camps and previously two companies come together at this event was fun. We are reassured that the new company, with its sole focus on these industrial software products, will continue to innovate and invest, both in the near term and in the future.
Thank You
We appreciate the opportunity Velotic provided to host Julie Fraser and Rick Franzosa at this event. Thanks to Carver Conway for arranging our meetings and keeping us analysts on track. Special thanks to Proficy VP of Operations Jeff Bartoletti and CMO Nicole Rowe for your openness. It was a delight to spend time in person with Stephen Pavlosky, Prasad Pai, Brian Johnson, and Joe Gerstl from the product management team, as well as Phaedra Martin from industry marketing.
