Frequently Asked Questions

Digital transformation of physical systems and equipment related to infrastructure, manufacturing, mobility, or utilities, requires applications that can deeply understand the real world and respond intelligently in context. These apps need to reason over IoT data, simulate what-if scenarios, detect anomalies, and provide intuitive, often natural language–based, interfaces. Delivering such functionality involves integration of digital twin models, AI and ML models, simulation engines, and custom application logic. The effort to build digital twins and integrate them into applications is complex and expensive, typically achieved by integrating services often across multiple disconnected platforms and open-source technologies. Twinit solves this problem by providing a core set of capabilities, orchestrated by a low-code framework. It enables SIs to rapidly “compose” one off digital twin enabled applications, or “re-compose” application templates to create repeatable solutions.

Developing Apps that target the built environment is typically 3 – 5x faster on Twinit, as compared to building a standalone App. The diversity of skills needed for building, deploying and maintaining the App, the associated costs, and the time to value are all significantly lowered. You lower your risk by building your App on Twinit.

Industry benchmarks estimate that the cost to maintain applications over their lifecycle can be up to 80% of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Twinit lowers the lifecycle maintenance costs of Apps by 50 – 75%. These savings provide significant Return on Investment (ROI) on the cost incurred on Twinit subscriptions. Where do these savings come from? Technology changes: Twinit handles changes to underlying libraries, databases and middleware technologies. Changes to underlying backend technologies do not affect Apps that are built and deployed natively on Twinit. Requirement changes: An App on Twinit is a collection of scripts deployed to a Twinit workspace. The scripts are easily modified to meet functional requirements that evolve over time. Changes to the App do not touch the more complex backend services they interact with, diminishing the cost of change. Cyber security: While it is important for the App consider cyber security requirements, the bulk of remediation costs to mitigate progressively emerging cyber security risks are handled at the platform level.

CIOs grapple with technical debt or unmet expectations from existing IT investments. Custom applications or point solutions intended to address the gaps result in a heterogenous mix of technology stacks, leading to increased lifecycle costs, lack of inter-operability, vendor lock in, gaps in maintenance, support and more. CIOs of enterprises are also striving to harmonize data governance, enhance cyber security, ensure agility, scalability, and sustainability, while streamlining vendor relationships. Twinit solves all these challenges. It establishes a common tech stack and a composable approach to creating Apps that extend capabilities of existing IT systems and fill their gaps. The composable platform approach reduces lifecycle costs, enables interoperability, and improves agility, speed and support. Cyber security concerns are largely addressed at the platform level, reducing overhead of managing security of distinct Apps.

An App on Twinit is a collection of scripts (JavaScript) that define the data model, data pipelines, data persistence, business logic, permission models etc. Every time the App is deployed, a workspace is created on Twinit. The workspace provides a dedicated and access-controlled instance of all the scripts related to the App, and the application data. The scripts configure the Twinit services and dictate the behavior of the App for a specific workspace. This architecture allows Apps to be rapidly customized by editing the scripts, deploying them rapidly at scale, and managing their individual lifecycle.

SIs need to strike a balance between offering unique, differentiated solutions and leveraging the advantages of off-the-shelf products to ensure profitability and customer satisfaction. To be profitable, SIs must originate deals that involve differentiated solutions that provide them a competitive advantage. Off the shelf products do not provide them the required differentiation and offer limited flexibility to customize. However, they also need the benefits of implementing off the shelf products! They require low skill threshold for implementation, accelerated time to value, reusable and scalable solutions across multiple clients, minimized implementation risks, and reduced effort in managing the application lifecycle while ensuring continuous improvement. Twinit enables SIs to swiftly compose custom digital twin applications on Twinit through scripting, leveraging its low-code environment to reduce the skill barrier. These applications can be easily recomposed and scaled for deployment across multiple clients. Twinit’s platform services are continually updated to enhance performance, integrate new capabilities, adapt to technological changes, and meet evolving cybersecurity standards, minimizing the maintenance effort for the applications.