On March 1, Digital Water Works(DWW) announced that Bentley had made a strategic investment in its business. The company delivers digital twins for “wet” infrastructure (water and wastewater utilities).
“We’re pleased and honored to receive this strategic investment from Bentley,” said Digital Water Works founder and CEO Paul F. Boulos.
Established by Boulos in 2018, the company has a unique strategy: develop its own applications around and throughout commercial off-the-shelf BIM tech. The company uses this fusion of original and store-bought software to develop digital twins: BIM models + sensor tech that lets users understand what’s going on in the system in realtime.
Essentially, the company’s software enables customers to develop a 3D digital picture of what’s happening inside of their system, as well as perform an analysis on why it’s happening, and how it could change in the future. That software includes enterprise asset management (for both linear and discrete assets), maintenance analysis for both bad actors and root causes, and capital planning to lengthen the time that the asset is operational. The software is modular, and it’s available in desktop, cloud or hybrid versions.
Boulos hopes to keep working on his company’s solutions, and to phase in the product suite over the next five to ten months. “Next month, we will launch an early adopter program for progressive water and wastewater utilities and engineering firms who want to help with the product design plans, and then beta test the software,” he said.
While the two companies will work closely together, and Bentley will license its software directly to DWW’s customers, Bentley doesn’t plan to stop DWW from collaborating with other software vendors.
“We believe that our industry-leading OpenFlows modeling software and iTwin Services offerings can advantageously anchor water and wastewater utilities’ advancements in going digital,” said Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley. “But we believe even more strongly that an open approach, supported by an independent integrator leveraging our unprecedented open-source solution environment, can achieve the greatest benefits for each utility while accelerating the learning curve for all.”