On July 14th, Innovyze and Smart Water Magazine organised a webinar with the title “How the City of Scottsdale leveraged sensor data to streamline the analysis of the water distribution system thanks to Innovyze's new cloud platform”. Cristina Novo, technical editor of Smart Water Magazine and moderator of the event, introduced the webinar and Innovyze, a global leader in water infrastructure software based in Portland, Oregon, which has been building innovative software for the water industry for 35 years. It was acquired by Autodesk earlier this year, a move that creates a clearer path to a more sustainable and digitized water industry.
In the event, utilities and consultants heard how Innovyze’s new cloud platform, Info360, can help bridge the gap between data and operations, and long-term planning and engineering. The webinar was directed towards water utilities personnel working in any division: from operations, to engineering and planning, to management.
The first speaker was John Crochet, Regional Sales Manager for the Mountain West Region. He started his talk with a brief overview of Innovyze’s product lines: water distribution and management; stormwater, sewer and flood modeling; asset management, operational analytics, and drainage design and analysis. He then presented the Info360 online platform, which focuses on the use of live data to run analyses. Data are collected from a lot of sources for asset management and operational analytics solutions, something which inspired the creation of an enterprise platform open to anybody from a utility to use: an operator, an engineer, a manager, someone in the field, a consultant. The idea behind the Info360 cloud platform is “a platform to house the live data and process it efficiently, do analytics on it, and in turn bring in those data points and analytics into desktop modeling solutions”. The benefit from an engineering standpoint is “you can process the raw data, bring it into a model and utilize it for planning and engineering”, so that all the data collected and analytics get used by the entire organization.
John then turned to the focus of the webinar: Info360 Insight, one of the applications for the Info360 platform, an operational analytics application that connects to the distribution system SCADA system, any meter data and other live data collected. He wrapped up his presentation with some key features of Info360 Insight. The data is stored in a clean, time-series format, to perform different analytics and build different dashboards, enabling tracking system performance over time. One of the main benefits is processed data can be brought into hydraulic models.