Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that BrianzAcque, a provider of water and sewage utility services in Italy, has standardized on Red Hat OpenShift to manage its network of smart water kiosks across a hybrid cloud environment.
We needed a simple and flexible solution that would also prove reliable and help us meet regulatory requirements, and we saw Red Hat as a trusted provider of stability and enterprise security.
BrianzAcque provides water and sewage utility services to close to 900,000 citizens in Italy. It operates 69 self-service Case dell’acqua water kiosks and a further 62 water dispensers across the Monza and Brianza region, which dispense still and sparkling water, that consumers can purchase using a rechargeable payment card. The smart kiosks serve as communal hubs for citizens, and create an opportunity for BrianzAcque to communicate directly with consumers through digital displays.
BrianzAcque wanted to centralize management of its network of smart kiosks and dispensers for operational efficiency and to more easily provide relevant, real-time information on water consumption and quality, such as pH and mineral levels for every kiosk. BrianzAcque needed to integrate data from its laboratories with consumption figures collected in the field so that it could more effectively read payment cards and process water supply.
The utility provider sought to create a more responsive, microservices-based IT architecture to support this network of intelligent devices and enable cloud-native development of new software. BrianzAcque chose to deploy Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, underpinned by Red Hat Enterprise Linux the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform built for the hybrid cloud. A multi-cloud architecture was chosen, currently deployed on IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds. BrianzAcque completed the deployment with the help of IT partner Plurimedia, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner. Red Hat OpenShift provides a more consistent foundation for developing, deploying and scaling containerized applications across a multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure, from modern, cloud-native applications to legacy workloads.
BrianzAcque can now centrally manage all kiosks and water dispensers that are located in the field. In addition to the kiosk and dispenser management module, around 20 microservices have been implemented, providing functions such as water quality reading uploads, form downloads and completion, and several components that support features on BrianzAcque’s website. As well as more accurately communicating water quality to customers, BrianzAcque can share public service information such as opening times and local events or traffic conditions.
Providing a common platform, Red Hat OpenShift has helped BrianzAcque simplify operational work for its internal teams and enables developers to focus on creating new features and fixes, such as integrated management of kiosks, dispensers and card distributors, instead of adapting to different infrastructure. BrianzAcque has reduced staff time needed to manage and publish lab data, contributing to a general reduction in lab data publishing costs. Running Red Hat OpenShift on all cloud instances provides a consistent, more secure and highly performant foundation and helps reduce costs related to the management of systems and applications.
BrianzAcque plans to extend its network of water kiosks and dispensers to more towns, including locations such as fire stations, police stations and government buildings, and provide new location-based communications opportunities for public service providers such as weather alerts or police notices. BrianzAcque aims to have 100 kiosks operational by 2021, deploying at least one water dispenser in every school of the Monza and Brianza region, with plans to grow its kiosk and water dispenser network by an additional 40% each year.
