In a quiet room, away from the hustle and bustle of industrial innovators at AVEVA World 2025, I sat down with Kim Custeau, the Executive Vice President of Portfolio Management at AVEVA.
Eager to begin our conversation, Kim clarified her role at AVEVA. She explained her responsibility to ensure that AVEVA’s offerings align with customer demands in an ever-evolving market by investing in client-focused solutions. “At AVEVA, I’m responsible for portfolio strategy, aligning the business goals with the right products and changes. We focus on protecting and nurturing our existing customer base while also investing in new solutions,” she said.
One of the key solutions Kim mentioned is CONNECT, AVEVA’s flagship industrial intelligence platform. This platform provides on-demand cloud services, enabling teams worldwide to collaborate in real-time across various industrial ecosystems. As an effective tool for predicting outcomes and improving efficiency, CONNECT allows users to share industry data on the cloud, enhancing workflow models and driving digital transformation across sectors such as manufacturing, marine, and energy.
CONNECT offers a comprehensive view of industrial data to address critical pain points that hinder efficiency. By integrating partner applications with AVEVA’s proprietary software, CONNECT delivers a wide array of digital solutions within a single platform, improving industrial workflows and creating interoperability between software applications for the benefit of customers. Kim elaborated, “We aim to create an open and agnostic platform, seamlessly integrating AVEVA software and third-party solutions. This ensures that everything plugs in and works together smoothly.”
For users, CONNECT simplifies the process: with a single click, customers can publish their industrial data to the cloud, allowing third parties easy access through user-friendly API integration and a community feature that facilitates sharing insights and data.
To illustrate the real-world impact of data sharing through CONNECT, Kim shared an example involving a mining customer in South Africa. “Our solution allows them to push data to the cloud, granting their service providers and partners access to critical information and enabling enhanced equipment performance analysis. In the mining industry, data sharing through our platform empowers experts—such as universities in South Africa—to provide insights that help the entire industry operate more effectively.”
Data quality is paramount for CONNECT and data-driven software solutions in general; poor-quality data leads to subpar outcomes, while high-quality data yields valuable insights for stakeholders. CONNECT provides context to data from multiple connected systems, enabling better-informed decisions. For example, integrating temperature, process, and engineering data offers stakeholders a broader context for solving specific industrial problems.
AVEVA has a significant impact on various industrial sectors; however, Kim expressed a desire to see the company expand further into industries such as marine, particularly shipbuilding. “Doing more in the marine sector means forging stronger partnerships, amplifying our message, and integrating deeper into shipyard operations,” she stated. Expanding AVEVA’s “45% market share in ship design” is a top priority, along with focusing on key sectors and data centers where AVEVA software can address critical challenges in quality and energy efficiency applications.
Looking ahead, AVEVA plans to include applications from both its own offerings and those of partners on the CONNECT platform, further increasing the value it provides to customers. As we wrapped up our conversation, Kim reflected on her 40 years with the company, describing her experience at AVEVA World as the “best week of the year,” a sentiment I could easily see during my short time at the event.
