Vodafone Business, Cisco and Alleantia for digital transformation

Milan, October 7, 2021 - Vodafone Business, Cisco and Alleantia have announced a partnership to speed up the digital transition process for italian businesses. This collaboration gives rise to Vodafone Industrial Connect, a ready-to-use IoT solution designed to digitize manufacturing facilities, to monitor input/output data in real time, and to provide information about the operation and status, optimizing the production process and making development decisions. The first company to adopt Vodafone Industrial Connect's technology is Intergroup: the logistics company will integrate the solution into the packaging lines of its factories across the country.

The partnership expands and strengthens the strategic relationship built up between Vodafone Business and Cisco over the last few years and, with the entry of Alleantia, opnes up new development perspectives thanks to the combination of their respective skills. The agreement is based on a joint analysis of the Italian IoT market and customer needs to support the Italian manufacturing sector along the path to digital transformation, including SMEs, on whose relaunch the country's competitiveness depends.

In an increasingly dynamic and competitive market, the Internet of Things becomes the first enabler of digitalization for SMEs and large companies and a key factor for business resilience. The constant availability of real-time data on the operation of plants and machines allows each stage of the production cycle to be kept under control, and enables prompt action if malfunctions or breakdowns should occur, thus avoiding production outages. Basing decision-making processes on data-driven, using IoT solutions, means empowering companies with the tools to start the transition to Industry 4.0.

Vodafone Industrial Connect by Vodafone Business responds to the need of the manufacturing sector to have a ready-to-use Internet of Things service that is easy to integrate the manufacturing environment, even if it consists of older facilities. Vodafone Business developed the solution with hardware from Cisco, a world networking and IT leader, and software from Alleantia, a young and dynamic Italian SME. The scalable, easy-to-use solution helps companies to exploit the potential of technology without having to manage its complexity.

Vodafone Industrial Connect has a simple and intuitive user interface that makes it easy to determine and analyze the status of machines and production lines, with the opportunity to create and receive custom alerts. Vodafone Industrial Connect collects and processes production data, and then sends it to the IoT cloud platform via secure Vodafone mobile connectivity. Customers can access to the reports via a web and thereby make their decision-making processes data-driven. Vodafone Industrial Connect's IoT solution also reduces the company's environmental impact because it enables energy efficiency and a decrease in industrial waste by virtue of optimizing the production process.

The first Italian company to have chosen Vodafone Industrial Connect is Intergroup, an integrated logistics company founded in 1986 that offers national and international transport, logistics services in the port terminals of Oristano, Rome and Lazio (Gaeta and Civitavecchia), packaging services and distribution of raw materials throughout Italy with seven distribution platforms. As part of a digital innovation path towards Industry 4.0, Intergroup has chosen to integrate the end-to-end IoT solution from Vodafone Business, Cisco and Alleantia to its packaging lines, to collect plant data and thus be able to plan and control production in real time.

"With this new collaboration, which is part of an ecosystem of national and international partnerships, Vodafone Business has confirmed its support for companies along their digitalisation path. Vodafone Industrial Connect further expands the offering of innovative solutions to speed up the digital transformation of businesses," says Giorgio Migliarina, Head of Vodafone Business in Italy. "Vodafone Business aims to be an enabler and accelerator of Italian companies' future, by giving them the right tools to tackle the digital transition that new market challenges are calling for. Partnerships with companies like Cisco and Alleantia - with whom we co-invest and drive innovation - enable us to provide SMEs with products and services to speed up their digital transformation, and also to foresee upcoming business challenges."

"An end-to-end solution as Vodafone Industrial Connect helps to get innovation, competitiveness, sustainability, with an efficacy that comes from the choice of pooling different skills and specialisations," says Gianmatteo Manghi, CEO of Cisco. "The collaboration with Alleantia and Vodafone Business is a clear example of this teamwork. Creating an ecosystem made up of lasting agreements, designed to realize concrete solutions, is important to allow us to propose vertical solutions that enable the digitalization of production processes in the industrial sector".

Stefano Linari, Founder and CEO of Alleantia, says: “We are proud for having contributed to Vodafone Industrial Connect. This complete and turnkey solution will allow any entrepreneur to bring the concept of Industry 4.0 to their plants thanks to the Plug & Play simplicity of our software. Alleantia's software provides more than 5000 ready-to-use drivers for industrial machinery and sensors from hundreds of different manufacturers and is one of the few software in the world certified for Cisco IoT gateways, offering the highest levels of security. Vodafone Industrial Connect was conceived and developed to offer maximum simplicity, scalability and reliability to both IT and production managers to achieve full convergence between machinery and information systems, even in the Cloud, with a new business model that we could define “Digital Twin as a Service”.