About our customer

 
Autostrade per l’Italia is a prominent toll motorway concessionaire in Europe, managing approximately 3,000km of network in Italy. The company and its subsidiaries are dedicated to delivering safe, sustainable, and efficient road infrastructure for the benefit of motorists and the wider transportation industry. In 2020, Autostrade per l’Italia has initiated a digital transformation journey aimed at harnessing the power of data, enhancing its technology ecosystem, and migrating to the cloud.
 

Key facts & figures:

4.8 billion EUR turnover (2021)

3,000km of motorway in Italy

9,000 employees

Challenge

 
Autostrade per l’Italia was facing various challenges due to the prevalence of manual activities related to traffic, safety, and maintenance. Such activities resulted in operational risks, which could have been reduced by standardizing the processes between Autostrade per l’Italia and its subsidiaries. Furthermore, the user experience was not sufficiently digitized for travelers, employees, and field operators, while fragmented data led to asynchronous reporting and low AI adoption, which amplified the inefficiencies. In addition, legacy on-premise systems limited the connectivity of the group infrastructures.

For instance, in 2020, the group faced difficulties with managing various vertical reporting systems that allowed for the analysis of different business areas independently. This approach was functional, but when top management requested an automated and comprehensive system to calculate KPIs across all business areas, it became inadequate. Due to the existing architecture’s inability to implement such a system, the company decided to embrace a new journey towards digital transformation – with a cloud migration in mind to consolidate all available data while providing scalability. This was especially crucial for a complex organization like Autostrade per l’Italia, which deals with vast amounts of data from different sources.
 

A journey towards digital transformation

 
In fact, and despite all these challenges, Autostrade per l’Italia saw an opportunity to modernize its operations, processes, and technologies through digital transformation. Thus, in 2020, the group decided to invest more than 200 million euros over three years to simultaneously launch three transformation programs:
 

Next to Digital – to digitize the company’s operational and corporate processes, with over 130 products in the pipeline for delivery.

DnA – to leverage data and extract value, with a plan to enhance corporate data, evolve data management platforms, and apply analytics and AI.

IT Modernization – to migrate the technology platform to the cloud, modernize the Group’s technological ecosystem, and eliminate legacy technologies while introducing modular and scalable architectures.

 
These programs are relying on five key principles that are crucial to the success of the organization:
 

1. Data democratization – to make data available and accessible to anyone in the company who needs it.
2. Informed decision-making – to infuse a culture of decision-making based on valuable, quality information, rather than intuition or experience.
3. New data-driven business – to transform the processes and the identification of new business opportunities through the use of data.
4. Data monetization – to promote data as an asset, i.e. its potential for optimization and cost savings while also creating opportunities for external sale, exchange, or open sharing (open data).
5. R&D and partnerships – to leverage the expertise of various internal and external providers, creating a network of partners that can collaboratively use data to achieve their goals.

Solution

 
Autostrade per l’Italia started the transformation by building a data analytics platform where data coming from a wide variety of sources and applications (IBM DB2, Salesforce, sensors, SAP, etc.) was injected and transferred to the cloud in its raw form. This is the initial stage of the data lake process, where the raw data is progressively processed, integrated, and optimized until it is ready for visualization. Then a data visualization component enables interactive querying of the data, and ensures that users can extract valuable insights from the data with minimal effort and maximum efficiency. Finally, the third module of the data analytics platform was a data modeling component that allowed Autostrade per l’Italia to start capturing metadata, such as the structure of datasets, their meaning, primary keys, relationships, and more.
 

© 2023 Autostrade per l’Italia for Zeenea – All Rights Reserved

As Autostrade per l’Italia continued to pour data into their data lake, the growth became explosive, which made it increasingly challenging to manage interdependencies between different projects and systems. To address this, they needed to introduce a metadata curation tool to document datasets in terms of their meaning, properties, lineage, and more.

Autostrade per l’Italia’s journey with Zeenea

After a thorough evaluation of various options, Autostrade per l’Italia ultimately chose Zeenea Data Discovery Platform and its Data Catalog to solve this challenge – and this for three key reasons:
 

The user-friendly interface – the solution needed to be accessible to both technical and business teams. The company involved the business in the decision-making process and Zeenea was rated as the most intuitive and easy to navigate solution, enabling a self-service approach to data.

The flexible metamodel – Zeenea offers a simple but very flexible metamodel with basic concepts. It allowed the organization to easily customize and enrich it with specific entities like for instance the concept of application, which enabled them to censor the level of privacy and sensitivity of the data.

The pricing – Zeenea was more affordable than other platforms that Autostrade per l’Italia evaluated, making it a cost-effective solution for their needs.

 
Thus, Zeenea serves as the gateway to accessing data at the Italian organization, providing a platform where various types of metadata are curated, from business glossaries and data lineage to data classification and meanings. This metadata is primarily captured automatically through scanners that retrieve information from various platforms on the data platform.

© 2023 Autostrade per l’Italia for Zeenea – All Rights Reserved

 
Furthermore, Zeenea caters to different types of users at Autostrade per l’Italia, starting with the data governance team, who oversee the platform, followed by business users who use self-service tools to research and analyze data. Lastly, developers use the platform to create pipelines, dashboards, and artificial intelligence-based solutions and access data already in the data lake to prevent duplication and facilitate information retrieval.

Zeenea became a vital component in the data platform, enabling easy access and understanding of data sets.