Element Announces Element Unify Integration with Microsoft Azure Digital Twins

By AIT News Desk On Jun 1, 2022

Simplifies the consumption of critical IT, OT and ET data in Azure, accelerating digital twin development and adoption for industrial customers

Element, a leading software provider in IT/OT/ET data management for industrial enterprises, announced the general availability of the integration of Element Unify with Azure Digital Twins . Element Unify for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins enables critical enterprise application and OT systems data to be integrated into Azure Digital Twins, reducing time to insights for industrial customers at scale.

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“Scaling these programs requires adopting state-of-the-art, edge-to-cloud platform capabilities with tools to deliver use cases in a fast and cost-efficient manner. Our work with Microsoft has allowed us to bring this to life for our customers.”

Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins is a cloud service for creating digital twin models of physical and logical assets (buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, people, and processes) that describe the asset’s contents and relationships (properties, components and inheritance). Industrial Transformation (IX) platforms powered by digital twins have the potential to unlock tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in value across the industrial enterprise market. This can help companies prevent revenue loss, reduce unplanned outages, enable O&M cost optimization, extend the life of assets, and improve safety and regulatory measures.

“We are excited to bring this integration with Element to our customers. Analytical tools typically adopted by industrial companies tend to lack the engineering design data blended with time series data, which is foundational to a digital twin,” said Tony Shakib, Partner General Manager, Microsoft Azure IoT at Microsoft. “With Element’s Unify platform, we are able to solve this in Azure Digital Twins and make enterprise-wide twin adoption possible at scale.”

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The Element Unify integration with Azure Digital Twins enables customers to:

Model and Publish Digital Twin Templates & Graphs. Accelerate the deployment of digital twin models through the use of Unify templates (i.e. assets, equipment, etc.) and attributes which are translated to Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) interface Telemetry, Properties, Components and Relationships. These DTDL objects are published to Azure Digital Twins as interfaces. The Unify Graph models are published to Azure Digital Twins as digital twin instances and relationships.
Govern & Maintain Models. Ensure that the digital twin effectively mimics the physical reality and delivers sound analytics in a live execution environment. This is accomplished through synchronizing Azure Digital Twins and the Unify semantic data model.
Ingest Brownfield Azure Digital Twin Models. Leverages pre-existing Azure Digital Twins models by importing to Unify allowing reuse and governance in Unify’s semantic data model. Following DTDL translation the results are saved in Unify’s Template Library and manifest in Unify Graph.

Element’s computable data model makes it easy for Microsoft customers to leverage their OT data in all Azure services they use, not just Azure Digital Twins. This includes Power BI, PowerApps, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob Storage and others to support additional analytics and business decision-making use cases.

“At Element, we listen to our customers’ feedback and there is an increasing desire to move their Industrial Transformation (IX) initiatives from PoCs and projects into actual programs that can scale,” said Andy Bane, CEO of Element. “Scaling these programs requires adopting state-of-the-art, edge-to-cloud platform capabilities with tools to deliver use cases in a fast and cost-efficient manner. Our work with Microsoft has allowed us to bring this to life for our customers.”

Element Unify provides platform capabilities for industrial data ingestion, data contextualization, the creation and maintenance of a semantic data model and data governance. Unify’s no-code connectors access source system data and deliver data models to apps and services like Azure Digital Twins. No-code data pipelines utilize data transformations and functions to contextualize IT/OT/ET data and auto-sync for up-to-date source system representation. The Unify Graph stores relationships across all data in a computable semantic data model to enable flexibility, rapid schema materialization, data governance and re-use.

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