Agreement between Enel and Cisco Italia to expand the collaboration started in 2017. As planned Cisco will be Enel's Global Technology Partner "for the development of innovative solutions for electricity grids, the promotion and diffusion of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies, the improvement of Cybersecurity processes and the scouting of co-innovation solutions with a view to Open Innovation", he says Enel in a note.
The partnership also provides for the creation of further collaborations on crowdsourcing, to be implemented on the OpenInnovability.com platform, created by Enel to collect innovative and sustainable solutions.
Going into the details, Cisco will contribute to the partnership with IIoT technologies and Edge Intelligence and the two companies will also work together in the area of physical and digital security, in particular on the issue of protecting critical infrastructures.
“The partnership with Cisco – he says Ernesto Ciorra, Head of Innovability at Enel – confirms our commitment to developing technological innovations that accelerate the energy transition. We work openly on these innovations, collaborating with numerous startups, prestigious universities and, as in this case, with world-leading innovation companies in their sectors. With Cisco we will innovate in various areas: from IT security to connectivity and intelligent asset management. The energy transition poses major challenges for our planet. Challenges that we will overcome if we combine humility and mental openness, necessary for collaboration, with the ability to implement radical visions of sustainable progress, with courage and passion".
Gianmatteo Manghi, commercial director of Cisco Italy comments: “The digital transformation in the generation and distribution of energy is fundamental for our future: it represents the key to facing the challenge of sustainable growth, based on the use of clean, renewable and distributed sources. New automated, programmable and secure networks allow today to create truly innovative solutions for a critical infrastructure for the country and its citizens”.
During the three years in which the two groups have collaborated, numerous co-education activities have been carried out, through training courses on networking technologies and Cybersecurity, a course dedicated to smart grids has been offered and technological experiments have been carried out on which also includes some of the development lines envisaged by the new agreement, among which the remote monitoring of road cabinets stands out, using IIoT technologies and LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) connectivity.
