Abstract: A system for securely and efficiently obtaining data from a process plant and processing that data for consumption by one or more external applications or systems includes receiving event data from various data sources in or associated with a plant via various different data formats and data communication structures at a centralized server or gateway, striping off the communication format structure from the data, placing the data, including metadata associated with the data, into an event stream, and making the data in the event stream available to a processing infrastructure that processes that data in a comprehensive and robust manner for easy consumption by external data mining, data visualization and data analytic systems or applications.