Italian gas and water distributor Italgas is working with Infovista to bring visibility and control to eight million cellular-connected smart meters, connected via the country’s three mobile network operators. Infovista said it has supplied the Italian utility with its Ativa assurance solution to help it to manage smart meters across Italy in a single dashboard, and to help it to meet service level agreements (SLAs) imposed by the local regulator and reduce operational costs and enhance service reliability.
Italgas is required by the Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks, and Environment (ARERA) to deliver daily meter readings. There are penalties if it fails to meet the SLA. The company hopes to achieve “more than 90 percent cost reduction” by minimizing field visits, improving visibility of the “network quality” Italgas receives from operators TIM, Vodafone, and Wind. The Ativa platform provides “automated assurance” of the Italian firm’s eight million IoT devices, said Infovista.
Ativa, described as a “cloud-native and open platform by design”, connects with Italgas’ own cloud-based business intelligence systems. It monitors traffic from Italgas’ IoT devices independently of the operators delivering the IoT connectivity. It is connectivity-agnostic, the firm said. Its multi-tenancy capabilities mean it can be expanded to other international markets in which Italgas operates. The solution can be extended to provide monitoring to network operators, as well.
A spokesperson said: “Infovista’s role here is enabling Italgas to monitor all connectivity and identify if a problem occurs, whose fault it is, and the best fix to apply – for example, if it is an issue with one of the mobile operators, or is it one of their meters, which would require an engineer to be sent in order to fix.”
Diego Vola, telecoms project manager at Italgas, said: “The challenge of managing a network of over eight million IoT devices is significant – but even more so when you add the regulatory requirement for every one of these devices to be connected and providing daily meter readings. The ability to quickly identify and resolve the root-cause of a problem is critical to both the customer experience we deliver and the SLAs to which we are accountable.”
Franco Messori, chief strategic officer at Infovista, said: “Increasing deployment of IoT devices in industrial and enterprise environments is creating assurance challenges such as monitoring and troubleshooting which are new for businesses for whom connectivity is not their core focus. Italgas is a perfect example – it has a network of millions of smart meters connected to a central system via public mobile networks. The assurance of optimal performance can only be achieved by having the right observability and control to ensure the efficient operation of their expansive IoT network.”
