Digital twins have the potential for a myriad of use cases, and no single vendor can possibly address all those use cases or foresee how those use cases will evolve over the next five years. So, it is important for developers to design their applications with flexibility in mind. In soft- ware terms, that means open. Pavan Emani, vice president, iTwin software development for Bentley Systems, said, “What differentiates Bentley is its open approach. Open data and open source mean that users retain control and flexibility. We like to say that the greater the engineering density, the greater value we add. But often, there is great value from simply visualizing engineer- ing data in context. Bringing layers of data together into a single pane of glass, or single view of truth, provides an intuitive way for many people to understand and interact with very complex information.” Combining ET, IT, and OT Bentley Systems is a leading global provider of software solutions to engineers, architects, geospatial professionals, constructors, and own- er-operators for the design, construction, and operation of infrastructure. Bentley has a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Monthly active users of Bentley’s cloud-provisioned applications, including digital twins, made Bentley one of the top 25 consumers of Azure in 2019. In both 2018 and 2019, Microsoft named Bentley as Partner of the Year in its CityNext category. Jerry King, vice president, Strategic Channel for Bentley Systems, said, “Many of Bentley’s users choose Azure as the cloud platform to manage their data. There is a significant overlap in our user base, so it made sense for us to provide the integration of iTwin and Azure Digital Twins and capture synergies. Our goal is to be the infrastructure
digital twin platform company. That means combining engineering technologies (ET) with information technologies (IT) and operational technologies (OT) – think of combining CAD, BIM and GIS data with ERP, EAM data and IoT data to form a digital twin. We surface that IoT data using Azure Digital Twins and Azure IoT Hub.” Editor’s Notes Bentley’s iTwin Platform is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that com- prises cloud microservices for managing infrastructure data. It includes cloud microservices for project delivery and asset operations work- flows, reality data management, and components catalogs. An iTwin is an infrastructure digital twin, enabled by technologies from Bentley. An iTwin incorporates different types of data repositories – including drawings, specifications, documents, analytical models, pho- tos, reality meshes, IoT feeds, and enterprise resource and enterprise asset management data – into a living, evergreen digital twin. iTwin Services are a set of cloud services running in Azure that enable engineering teams and owner-operators to create, visualize, and ana- lyze digital twins of infrastructure assets. iTwin Services enable digital information managers and BIM managers to incorporate engineering data created by diverse design tools into a living digital twin and align it with reality modeling and other associated data, visualize the asset, check status, perform analysis, and generate insights to predict and optimize asset performance. Azure Digital Twins is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) targeted at in- house and commercial software development organizations that want to accelerate and simplify the creation of digital twin solutions that require IoT spatial intelligence. Azure Digital Twins enables develop-
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csengineermag.com
july 2020
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