Innovyze, an Autodesk Company, Reduces Development Time by 60% Using AWS Managed Services and AWS IoT

For Innovyze’s legacy on-premises solution for operational analytics of water networks, each new customer needed to go through a major install and implementation process to use its application. This process involved customers racking and stacking servers, installing various databases, and installing software before implementing a solution. To improve operational efficiencies and customer experience, Innovyze decided to build cloud-based solutions.

Innovyze’s customers install the Info360 data ingestion solution next to their SCADA software. With the ingestion solution in place, Innovyze can pull telemetry data securely from the SCADA systems into Info360 Insight or Info360 Plant running in the AWS Cloud through Amazon Kinesis, used to collect, process, and analyze video and data streams in near real time. Innovyze stores large bulks of data in the cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Innovyze uses AWS IoT Core, which can be used to easily and securely connect devices to the cloud, without its customers having to manage any infrastructure and to securely communicate with and remotely control devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.

Innovyze uses serverless services from AWS to run its solutions. The majority of the company’s compute layer of business logic for the solution runs on AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that businesses use to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. The company uses Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus that makes it easier to build event-driven applications at scale, to run its event-driven architecture. “The serverless services that we use don’t require us to deal with any scaling or scale planning; they run to the scale that we need and allow our development teams to develop independently using an event-driven architecture,” says Brudner.

Innovyze reduced its time to market by more than 60 percent by accelerating development time from 2–3 years to less than 12 months. The company also improved deployment implementation time for customers. “In the past, development time was measured in years and implementation time for the legacy operational analytics product took months,” says Brudner. “Now, development time is measured in months and implementation is measured in hours.” Another benefit is the use of built-in security models provided by AWS. “Using AWS IoT Greengrass, we provide a secure and scalable mechanism to unlock data from our customers’ on-premises environments to give them great visibility into their operations and data in the cloud,” says Brudner.

With Info360 Insight and Info360 Plant, utility customers have a place where they can see telemetry data from all their systems and sensors. They can run calculations on top of that data to produce water metrics and evaluate the health of water infrastructure. Customers can simulate and understand how water systems behave and identify and isolate leaks. With its cloud-based solutions, Innovyze provides all these capabilities out of the box. This service helps customers collaborate and manage projects across new verticals within water utilities and water/wastewater treatment plants. “Our products contribute to customer sustainability,” says Brudner. “Info360 Insight helps them minimize water loss and provides better visibility into water incidents.”