Origin of ZOOMS

From 1999 to 2004, I was the fermentation engineer at the world’s largest factory (by capacity) for the production of medicines made from mammalian cell culture.

Everyday, my job was to come in and review the trends of the bioreactors and be on the watch for special-cause variability. If I saw something, I could call down to the floor and ask a technician to verify my observations, and if we required troubleshooting or corrective action, we would get the job done.

I used PI ProcessBook every day of my life for those 5-years, and the PI database was the source of all instrument/control data I needed for both short-term and long-term data. All was well in my world.

By 2004, I had written enough VBA code to automate tasks in PI ProcessBook and I transferred to headquarters for a role focused on getting data in front of the eyeballs of other scientists and engineers. Cool new technologies and companies, such as Google, were on the rise.

I left my employer in 2007 to start Zymergi, LLC; we performed field-service, data management consulting, and R&D for information systems in the process industries.

By 2007, it had become clear to me that Google, a full-text search engine, was ill-equipped to search trend-data… the data was mostly numeric, and that a new semantic search engine was needed for people to search trends within valuable enterprise resources such as OSIsoft’s PI.

By Q2 2008, we embarked on creating Zymergi Metadata Search for PI. By Q4 2008, we created Zymergi Object-Oriented Metadata Search for PI (a.k.a. ZOOMS).

Our official launch was at the 2009 PI User’s conference in San Francisco, and here we are today.