Rackspace enables Innovyze's digital twins

Innovyze’s industry-leading software empowers thousands of water utilities around the world. Historically a desktop product business with on-premises software, Innovyze wanted to address the real-time operational needs of utilities by extending the capabilities of their offerings through a cloud-based platform. They were looking for an equally skilled partner to work hand-in-hand with their teams to help them hit aggressive timelines. The company turned to the cloud native development team at Rackspace Technology to help them deliver their new SaaS solution, Info360.com.

A primary goal for Innovyze was to enable an industry first for water, Dynamic Digital Twins, a virtual representation of water utility assets that is continuously updated with all known data about the — past, present, and future — incorporating cutting-edge technologies like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence tuned specifically for the water lifecycle.

“By moving simulation features of our modeling into the cloud, we can leverage that horsepower for really complex models, performing multiple parallel simulations for different scenarios like weather changes, flood prediction, and the like,” said Rick Gruenhagen, CTO of Innovyze. “The ability to use real-time data to develop Dynamic Digital Twins that are more accurate in representing conditions today and predicting conditions in the future is huge.”

By working with Rackspace Technology on extending its product offerings onto a common platform on AWS and leveraging cloud-native technologies, Innovyze was able to introduce Info360.com—a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that supports real-world water lifecycle management. The SaaS implementation of Info360.com offers several advantages to utilities in the areas of easy on-boarding, infinite scalability and rigorous security “out of the box.” In addition, Dynamic Digital Twins are now accessible to every water utility, without the need to invest in expensive IT infrastructure, maintain complex software, or hire hordes of digital consultants to use them.

“Working with Rackspace Technology helped our team achieve our goals on an immense project on a tight timeline. Our utility customers vary widely in size and infrastructure, and Rackspace Technology has helped us deliver a highly sophisticated platform where we can seamlessly onboard new customers and lower the barrier to entry for new municipalities,” said Gruenhagen. “Our customers can use real-time data to improve the accuracy of their models, which is a huge accomplishment in the water industry. The cloud-based approach reduces operational overhead for clients and gives Innovyze the freedom to continue innovating and leading the industry.”

The new platform, built with serverless and microservices technologies, enables Innovyze customers to transfer their asset network information to the cloud and leverage geospatial mapping functionalities for their site modeling. Rackspace Technology facilitated data transfer through a cross-platform edge solution, powered by Amazon Greengrass and Docker images. This functionality allows Innovyze customers to install the software in their existing IT environment.

“The Info360 Dynamic Digital Twin solution is a revolution for the water industry,” said Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT Solutions at Rackspace Technology. “Innovyze knew that cloud native services were the best path forward and that partnering with Rackspace Technology would accelerate their team’s goal of building a SaaS platform that realizes their vision of serving the entire water cycle, from cloud to ocean.”