Over the last few years, the term Internet of Things (IoT) has garnered worldwide attention. However, a new term is emerging that takes the IoT concept a step further: IIoT, i.e. Industrial Internet of Things. Based on IoT devices, IIoT technology is specially designed for Industry 4.0, which optimises industrial production processes by leveraging collected data. The startup Decisyon develops products with this approach, in order to bring on board industrial partners who are eager to create IIoT solutions for the market.

“Our mission is to help business managers and practitioners to execute [solutions] with confidence in any complicated industrial environment,” says Cosimo Palmisano, Decisyon’s co-founder and vice president of business development. In line with this vision, the firm has developed the Decisyon App Composer, an application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) to create scalable, data-intensive and collaborative applications. “The more IIoT evolves, the more companies are willing to create the best type of microservice available on the PaaS (Product-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) market.”

Palmisano explains that “the secret sauce of this platform is that it connects people, processes, company data and other things in a unique, low-coding environment.” This flexibility has enabled Decisyon to develop solutions for different sectors such as automotive, aviation, pharmaceutical, retail, utility and energy. The latter includes our Enel Green Power division.

"You know you’re looking at real innovation when, at the same time, you want to keep it secret so as to be the first and only user, but you also feel the irresistible urge to share it as soon as possible."

Cosimo Palmisano, Decisyon’s co-founder and vice president of business development

Belvisyon, the app for controlling the energy network

Our relationship with Decisyon began in 2014. IFS (Decisyon’s partner) was asked to scale one of Enel Green Power’s solutions: Belvis. “The main challenge was to make sure that the energy produced and consumed was correctly mapped in the overall value chain, in order to avoid blocks in the network and to prevent the wrong cash flows from ending up in the payment settlement system,” Palmisano explains.

Enel Green Power needed to digitise the overall flow of information coming from the production metering tools, as well as add sufficient analytics capabilities to prevent error-prone activities. Besides, “we aimed to add collaboration capabilities to accelerate the decision-making process during the reconciliation of the energy produced by the power plants and that ingested by the network,” Palmisano adds.

For this reason, Decisyon worked with EGP in developing a new software application called Belvisyon. “The value we brought to this app has been to drive IoT data, coming from the power plants, toward the decision-making chain,” Palmisano says. The positive results have allowed this ecosystem to scale up and implement the application in other countries, starting with South Africa.

On the road to developing even more disruptive energy solutions

The development of Belvisyon is not the only solution we have worked on together – in 2018, we began discussing how to address needs raised by other Enel business lines with Decisyon and opened up a conversation on relevant strategies for creating proof of concepts. “Enel has enabled us to share our technology at different levels of the organisation. This has helped us improve our product development strategies and meet the requirements of the promising energy sector,” Palmisano adds.

Decisyon currently has more than 200 customers, over 20,000 users, and active deployments in more than 50 countries. “For example, one of our digital factory solutions has already been deployed in 20 plants worldwide,” says the co-founder. Looking into the future, “we would like to develop our decision-making and collaborative skills further by adding tools that can help recommend the actions that need to be carried out.” 

Decisyon is a company with an eye on the future – it aims to be prepared for the challenges of future technology and to embrace the advances it will bring. “We started working in the Industry 4.0 space before the term was coined. We strongly believe data will become a commodity over the next years. The only added value that can be provided is the right decision at the right time,” Palmisano says. Without a doubt, Decisyon will be in the front line, thanks to its cutting-edge technology and unique ideas, which are based on both people and the decision-making process.”