Hera was founded in 2002 by combining a good 11 municipality-owned companies, all operating in the the Italian region of Emilia Romagna. Since its foundation until today, Hera has grown steadily, even extending its territorial presence. Other companies active in the same sectors, operating in Central and North Italy, have in fact joined the Group: Marche Multiservizi (Pesaro and Urbino); AcegasAps (Padua and Trieste), and Amga (Udine). Today Hera is one of Italy’s largest local utility companies, with over 8,500 collaborators and more than 3.5 millon users served. It collects and treats waste, distributes and sells electricity and gas, and manages the aqueduct, sewage system and waste water.
Hera has required to create a corporate platform for the remote control, remote management and supervision of the networks from which it distributes services to all of its operational staff. All this using the SUN Solaris hardware platform, already owned by the multi-services company. The biggest challenge? The Integrating over 2,000 RTUs (Remote Terminal Units) based on dozens of different technologies in order to optimize the energy efficiency of the networks and to get a perfect monitoring of the water and gas networks.
Today the system has significant figures at European level, with over 8,000 RTUs controlled, 200 users users that can be connected at the same time and almost 10 million pieces of information records stored every day.
Hera’s staff, thanks to constant training collaboration with us, managed to gradually grow up and to reach complete autonomy. In fact, some of the latest important developments – such as the leak detection system and the dedicated app – were totally developed by Hera in-house.
