Alstom: Modernizing Italy's rail infrastructure with Injenia and Google Cloud

About Alstom

Alstom is a world leader in integrated railway systems. It manages the widest range of solutions in the market, from high-speed trains to metros and tramways, and infrastructure and signalling solutions. Headquartered in France, the company operates in more than 60 countries and employs 31,000 people.

Industries: Other
Location: Italy

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About Injenia

Google Cloud Partner Injenia, based on Bologna, Italy, specializes in consulting services related to cloud-based technologies and solutions.

With Google Cloud, Alstom can easily manage a complex infrastructure of legacy hardware, software, and network protocols.

Google Cloud Results

  • Cut maintenance costs for IT resources to 10 percent of the original budget
  • Reduced the time to provision new environments from months to minutes
  • Improve cooperation of teams across the globe

Spinning up 100 virtual machines in one morning

Alstom, a world leader in Transport solutions, manages signalling solutions, high-speed trains, metro systems, tramways, and turn-key projects. Alstom relies heavily on IT technology all across its development lifecycle, starting from the phase of defining the expected circulation performance, to the implementation and testing of signalling solutions before the deployment to target installations on site. Due to the different projects and markets engaged across the world, Alstom teams need to address a wide range of system configurations, with specific solutions addressing circulation safety, system redundancy and availability to meet demanding revenue service requirements. All these solutions are designed and implemented in factory, involving relevant investments and long-term plans to ensure proper capacity and reactiveness.

To reduce the time, cost and complexity of coordinating engineering activities and IT needs, Alstom site located in Bologna led the deployment pilot of engineering to Cloud environment, in cooperation with Google Cloud Partner Injenia, which offers consulting for companies that use cloud-based technology. Injenia and Alstom chose Google Cloud because it could scale quickly and deliver the best network performance to address Alstom requirements.

“Google Cloud offered the most complete set of tools for provisioning and running Alstom’s complex system solutions.”

Cristiano Boscato, Injenia

Running engineering more easily

Injenia used Google Compute Engine to create virtual machines to run Alstom proprietary software, replacing the existing legacy hardware and software. This greatly simplified the provisioning required to serve and secure the overall engineering activities across the development lifecycle. Alstom can add new virtual machines whenever they are needed -- spinning up 100 virtual machines in one morning without the issues of capex expenditures, sourcing and maintenance costs.

Development teams are located around the world, including India, Europe and Americas. These teams can either work on local projects, or cooperate to leverage on the excellencies of the multinational organization. The Google Cloud CDN (content delivery network), with points of presence around the globe, ensures that resources are provided to engineering teams quickly and without delays. Virtual machines are instantiated in zones aligned with customer security requirements, to enforce data privacy. Work products generated during development activities are stored and analyzed in Google Cloud Storage. Starting from the pilot developed in Bologna, other Alstom sites in Europe, US and India are now involved in the project and rely on the same platform.

“With Google Cloud we’ve made it far easier for Alstom to coordinate and run its activities. They don’t have to deal with a complex infrastructure of legacy hardware, software and network protocols. Deploying a system is as easy as spinning up new virtual machines,” says Boscato.

“With Google Cloud, we can easily and quickly provision environments for multiple projects, rather than having to queue on available resources or take months to set up a new one. It has reduced our IT costs, and activities are performed without problems or glitches.”

Francesco Zoletto, Alstom

Faster provisioning, less-expensive development

With Google Cloud, Alstom can provision dedicated IT resources to every engineer right to the desktop, allowing to parallelize several projects and multiple evolution stages of each project, far more quickly and inexpensively than they could previously. The proprietary softwares run seamlessly because of the stability and speed of the Cloud CDN. To provision an environment for a new project, Alstom engineers can rely on templates of known and stable virtualized solutions based on Compute Engine. This has cut the time required to serve a new project from months to minutes. The operational maintenance costs of IT resources have been cut to 10% of the original budget. Multiple access to the same virtual machine is used to strengthen cooperation across teams geographically dispersed, allowing to deliver state-of-the-art skills to implement system solutions across the globe.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Alstom

Alstom is a world leader in integrated railway systems. It manages the widest range of solutions in the market, from high-speed trains to metros and tramways, and infrastructure and signalling solutions. Headquartered in France, the company operates in more than 60 countries and employs 31,000 people.

Industries: Other
Location: Italy

About Injenia

Google Cloud Partner Injenia, based on Bologna, Italy, specializes in consulting services related to cloud-based technologies and solutions.