Innovyze Introduces Dynamic Digital Twins to the Water Industry with Info360 on AWS

Innovyze is a global water industry software leader with over 35 years of experience serving thousands of clients including the largest water utilities, ENR design firms, consultancies, and refining plants around the world. Today Innovyze announced the availability of its cloud-based platform for real-world water lifecycle management, Info360.com, on AWS. The solution brings the water industry dynamic digital twins, which are virtual models of real-world assets and systems that can learn and adapt to changing circumstances.

Info360.com is uniquely designed to support dynamic digital twins by gathering and unifying asset information, connecting live and historical performance data to Innovyze and to third-party water applications. Info360 models the performance of the water system using synchronized computational engines to predict the state and performance of the water infrastructure, allowing customers to proactively improve customer service, security, water system efficiency, and environmental outcomes.

“The complex, physical properties of water and massive, underground infrastructure that must be monitored and managed make digitization extremely challenging for water utilities. With Info360.com, we’ve combined 35 years of expertise in water management with the power of the AWS Cloud to bridge the data and technology gaps that have kept water utilities from truly capitalizing on digital twins. The Info360.com platform will be a game-changer in making digital transformation achievable for water utilities of any size,” says Colby Manwaring, Chief Executive Officer at Innovyze.

Info360 Insight is a SaaS application for data visualization also announced with the new platform. Using Info360 Insight, users can access asset performance data to perform daily operations such as pipe break detection and water loss, long-term maintenance and capacity planning, all with seamless integration to the hydraulic model. As a workflow solution, Info360 Insight provides real-time ingestion and analysis of SCADA data and 24/7 event monitoring, enabling utilities to quickly identify incidents in their system, check multiple resolution scenarios, and apply recommended actions to resolve system failures as quickly as possible.

“Info360 Insight is the first of several SaaS applications we’re delivering for the Info360.com platform, all offering advantages to utilities like easy onboarding, infinite scalability, and rigorous security out of the box. Better yet, the Info360 platform architecture incorporates cutting-edge technologies like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence tuned specifically for the water lifecycle, allowing utilities of all sizes to stay at the forefront of innovation without the need to maintain complex software or hire hordes of IT experts. As a result, utilities will have the technology foundation they need to deliver the highest possible service at the lowest possible cost,” said Rick Gruenhagen, Chief Technology Officer at Innovyze.

Innovyze’s AWS Architecture and Benefits

Starting at each customers’ on-premises data center, Innovyze’s Info360 platform uses AWS IoT Greengrass to connect with existing customer historian and open platform communications united architecture (OPC-UA) databases. All access to on-premises customer data stores is secured with AWS Secrets Manager. With this on-premises application presence, AWS IoT Greengrass is leveraged to read sensor data, process it, and securely export it to the cloud.

Innovyze Info360 Architecture

Customer sensor data is sent from the on-premises AWS IoT Greengrass component using two methods:

1. Near real-time data is pushed to cloud via the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose connector using secure HTTPs connection and from there to Amazon S3.
2. Historical data, often large bulk transfers, is securely pushed to Info360 cloud and to Amazon S3.

Event- Driven, serverless and multi-tenant architecture

Innovyze built Info360 on AWS using a multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture with an event-driven methodology using the Amazon EventBridge managed event bus and Lambda serverless functions to gain high scale, zero-cost idle and simplified lifecycle management with minimal DevOps maintenance overhead. The platform also incorporates Innovyze’s sophisticated hydraulic models developed specifically for utility management and refined over 30-years. For these high-performance Linux hydraulic engines, Innovyze chose to use Docker containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) running on the AWS Fargate serverless compute engine. For it’s Windows based hydraulic engines Innovyze uses Windows Amazon EC2 instances.

Innovyze Customer Benefits on AWS

Deploying on AWS Innovyze has gained agility benefits, leading to a fast time to market for the new Info360 platform through the use of managed services such as AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon S3, and Amazon EventBridge, AWS Secrets Manager and more. These services, with their built-in scalability and security, allowed Innovyze to focus on building core capabilities while relying on AWS services for undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Innovyze estimates that the AWS approach has reduced development costs and time to market by 50%.

Innovyze’s end customers benefit from streamlined onboarding, simplified data integration and application interoperability, scalability to accommodate growing data volumes, sophisticated AI/ML processing, and the strength of AWS Cloud security, reliability, and performance. Innovyze customers leverage the powerful new capabilities available with Info360 dynamic digital twins on AWS and the freedom to focus on core water assets and jobs to be done rather than on building and maintaining undifferentiated IT infrastructure.

To learn more about dynamic digital twins and to see a demonstration of Info360 Insight, watch this presentation hosted by Water Online. Register now here.

About Innovyze

Innovyze is a global leader in building innovative, industry-leading software for the water industry for over 35 years; serving thousands of clients including the largest utilities, ENR design firms, consultancies, and refining plants around the world. Learn more about Info360 or visit AWS Power and Utilities.