Italy
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About Olidata
Olidata S.p.A., headquartered in Rome and operating throughout Italy and internationally, is a System Integrator active in the digital services sector. Operating in the B2A and B2B markets, it offers complete solutions in cybersecurity, Big Data, artificial intelligence, software development, and the design of GIS and IoT systems.
Olidata is structured as a holding company, leading several companies, each operating in its own business sector but converging towards a common mission: to create a national hub focused on new technologies and new solutions entirely made in Italy. This aims to make the Group a true national champion, serving Public Administrations and Enterprises.
On August 1, 2024, Sferanet srl was merged into Olidata SpA. Sferanet srl was the driving force behind the relaunch of Olidata SpA on the Euronext Milan Stock Exchange.
The companies of the Olidata Group are: Divergento Srl, I-CON Srl, I-CON Real Estate Srl, Biancone Automobili Srl, Sfera Defence Srl, Sferanet DWC LLC, Le Fonti Group Società Benefit.
FairConnect provides advanced technological services to insurance companies in Italy, France, and Germany, with plans to expand throughout Europe. FairConnect's mission is to develop connected solutions for insurance companies that also improve the quality of life for individual policyholders. The solutions developed to collect and analyze data in near real-time from many sources, including "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices placed in vehicles and/or homes and customers' smartphones while ensuring compliance with privacy requirements (e.g., trip details are only visible on the smartphones of people in the vehicle on the specific trip).
The data helps insurance companies develop personalized commercial programs based on the specific needs of their customers and provide them with proactive assistance when needed.
In addition, FairConnect maintains a direct relationship with individual policyholders, offering technical assistance through its 24/7 operating center. This unique model has fueled its growth: in 2024, FairConnect will have over 800,000 connected customers.
FairConnect relies on Cloudera on AWS, along with partner Olidata, to deliver its innovative "connected living services" to insurers and policyholders
IoT and behavioral data present new challenges and opportunities
Insurance companies must provide customers with the highest quality service, especially regarding car or home insurance.
Data is a crucial part of this challenge. The insurance market needs to connect a growing number of endpoints and data sources of different natures. The first step is to collect and analyze data from IoT devices in homes, vehicles, and personal devices such as smartphones. This data is then enriched with other datasets from third-party entities (such as weather providers, mapping providers, etc.) that are essential to fuel AI models and deliver contextualized and personalized services to their customers.
However, the process is not simple. All these datasets must be integrated with the information managed by the insurance company's enterprise platform.
To this end, FairConnect provides insurance companies with services that integrate and analyze all these data sources. In addition to routine maintenance, FairConnect must ensure that data is collected, analyzed, and processed efficiently and made available on the service architecture for both insurance platforms and end customers. Machine learning and data science play a vital role in providing specific scoring and pricing based on risk level and detecting events that require immediate activation of rescue services.
Cloudera on AWS provides FairConnect with a foundation for data, analytics, and machine learning
By leveraging Cloudera's technology for its transformation project, FairConnect has developed a strategy based on data optimization and centralization. The company chose Cloudera on AWS for its adaptability, open architecture, and access to Cloudera's partner ecosystem, including Italian ISV Olidata.
At the end of 2022, FairConnect adopted Cloudera on AWS as the foundation for its multi-tenant enterprise data hub, with an open data lakehouse architecture. The platform helps them collect, manage, store, and analyze data in many formats and from many different sources. FairConnect's key features include integrated data authentication, authorization, auditing, and protection, while Olidata has enhanced the cluster to support larger data volumes and automatic node scaling.
Data is efficiently collected from sources with Cloudera DataFlow, which has tools for streaming data management and data engineering. Data separation and security are managed through built-in authentication and authorization capabilities. Cloudera SDX helps ensure secure and governed workload management.
The solution runs on AWS in the Frankfurt region, leveraging Amazon EC2 servers, Kubernetes, AWS Autoscaling, and Amazon S3 storage with data encryption.
The high sensitivity of the data, which includes IoT and behavioral data, makes security and governance critical, and Cloudera helps manage the virtual separation of data. Using Cloudera's Spark engines, the company easily processes both streaming and batch data. The solution also includes REST APIs, an analytics portal, and mobile APIs. Cloudera Machine Learning services provide innovative analytics for business and service improvement.
It is important to note that FairConnect has received accurate and timely technical support and proactive consulting services from all partners, collaborating with Cloudera's professional services to optimize the platform.
With the assistance of Olidata, FairConnect has integrated a data visualization module, which allows self-service access to data, and a machine learning module to enhance the work of data scientists beyond local resources or online services that require GPUs. Supporting data scientists is a key objective for continued development.
Results achieved by FairConnect for insurers and policyholders
Today FairConnect works with insurance groups in Italy, France, and Germany, with plans to expand. The company focuses on optimizing data analysis in the mobility and real estate sectors, with prospects for expansion in the health sector as well.
Using Cloudera's solutions and ecosystem, FairConnect has built a robust service. The first results of this collaboration have enabled FairConnect to help insurance companies significantly improve their knowledge of their policyholders, their risk analysis, and their related contextualized engagement. Insurance companies have also improved prevention and assistance services for their customers and their families, cohabitants, and additional drivers of the insured vehicle. For example, for the motor sector, services have been implemented that detect potentially dangerous driver behavior (e.g., distraction) and help them improve with coaching and rewarding campaigns and assistance services through the automatic detection of accidents with the immediate dispatch of medical and/or road rescue. Even in the property sector, the use of sensors combined with data from the insured's smartphone and their family members/cohabitants has made it possible, for example, to improve damage prevention in the event of severe weather events, sending preventive alert messages and the immediate activation of assistance in the event of detection of a fire start or water leaks, thus avoiding significant damage to the home.
A foundation for future growth
The partnership with Cloudera and access to its ecosystem are helping FairConnect to incorporate new data-driven technologies and services rapidly. FairConnect plans to add Apache Iceberg, the open table format for efficient data management.
Future technical projects will also focus on optimizing Cloudera on AWS for multi-zone data management, ensuring that cluster nodes are distributed across multiple AWS Availability Zones to continue operating during outages.
FairConnect's collaboration with Cloudera and Olidata is critical to business evolution and improved customer service.
