Developing pedestals as ‘technological hubs’

Italian company Gigieffe has spent over 40 years honing and perfecting pedestal designs for all-weather use in marinas. As part of its ongoing development and quest to remain at the forefront of technology, the company has partnered with CloudEnergy to create smart system offerings that impact positively on the marina operator and the boating customer.

Founded in 1962 primarily to install industrial electrical systems, Gigieffe started to specialise in the design and production of electricity and water dispensers for tourist ports and campsites in the early 1980s. Its products were soon exported worldwide and Gigieffe continues to enjoy a thriving export business in all continents.
Aquarius and Domyna are the two primary pedestals available with the CloudEnergy smart systems for service management. Aquarius, Gigieffe’s very first pedestal, is still in great demand and marketed in different versions. It features high resistance to UV radiation, accidental impact and weathering, and withstands extreme temperatures of -40°C to +110°C. Domyna shares the same durability features but has been designed with a two-part removable outer shell. Should accident occur to the structure, a replacement section can easily be installed without cutting off the electricity and water supply.
The smart journey
CloudEnergy integrates all services into a single app; a cloud-based offering that enables the marina operator to manage everything requiring monitoring or access control, from power and water pedestals to pedestrian entrances and car parks, to toilets, showers, swimming pools and electric vehicle charging stations.
Marina World talks to CloudEnergy’s key account manager Mirko Panzica:
Q: How was CloudEnergy formed and how did your relationship with Gigieffe begin? Did you come up with the idea to incorporate cloud-based management systems into marina power pedestals before working with Gigieffe?
A: CloudEnergy is a spin-off of an Italian company that’s been an ICT and industrial business since 1983, providing solutions for the industrial IoT field. CloudEnergy thus has the advantage of over 40 years of know-how in managing high tech projects integrating the best industrial connectivity devices with development of software management systems.
This experience positioned CloudEnergy as an ideal partner for infrastructure and service companies who wanted to digitalise ports and campsites.
Since 2018, CloudEnergy has been contacted by companies interested in providing solutions that were not just simple installations of electrical infrastructure but had full remote control via an intelligent cloud-based system or “smart system”. Not simple remote control but an intelligent management system.
We collaborated not only with companies for the digital development of ports, marinas and campsites but also with companies that manage electric charging of vehicles, both cars and bicycles.
The collaboration between CloudEnergy and Gigieffe emerged from years of natural selection in which the two companies benefited from each other’s professionalism and experience.
Q: Where did you first test the system at a marina? How long did it take and have you made many changes since?
A: After several months of system tests on some private berths, the first important project at a marina was in Darsena le Saline in Chioggia where we digitalised all service access to over 150 pedestals. Darsena le Saline is a long-standing satisfied Gigieffe customer who has always been very sensitive to functional improvements and innovations in marina solutions.
The first phase was obviously to make the system work, and this took almost 90 days to get up and running, including hardware installation, primary configuration and software customisation, and then integration with the existing and external infrastructure.
CloudEnergy and Gigieffe listen every day to customer needs and are continuously improving the system; the core of CloudEnergy is a cloud-based software solution so, by definition, it’s always evolving and all the improvements and new features are available to customers.
Recent improvements have been made to preventive and automatic maintenance, reports on any failures or waste of resources, sensors for boats etc.
Q: How did the collaboration with Gigieffe develop?
A: Simply put, CloudEnergy and Gigieffe started their collaboration with the limited aim of pedestal management (control/report of consumption, activation/deactivation of sockets etc). Day by day we transformed the pedestals to become a real technological hub to manage and integrate all marina services to meet current and even future needs.
Q: Is it possible to retrofit old pedestals with CloudEnergy?
A: Gigieffe and CloudEnergy always work together to offer each customer the best solution. The possibility of revamping is always evaluated and possible when the systems have the necessary characteristics. We discuss with the customer and we can apply the upgrade using a dedicated kit.
But there are many advantages for new smart pedestals with Cloud control, both for managers and end customers. The need to optimise time and cost is increasingly important. And let’s not forget that digitalisation also enjoys a ‘political push’ with incentives and financing.
Q: What is the procedure if a boat owner/customer doesn’t have a smart phone?
A: The CloudEnergy solution doesn’t cut out users who prefer traditional systems. The procedure is still simple and fast compared to the past. Nothing changes for the customer. As before, he contacts the marina manager, requests the services and the pedestals are immediately available. At the same time, thanks to CloudEnergy, the manager can give the customer a much faster service than before by being able to immediately locate the pedestal and the plug, activating it remotely and billing the consumption directly into the marina’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
We also provide marinas with some touch screen digital totems to provide independent access to the CloudEnergy app, even for users who don’t want to access the app from their smart phone. This gives added advantages without reducing flexibility.
Q: How do you see intelligent marina management systems developing and how are you ‘future-proofing’ CloudEnergy?
A: The financial outlook for tourism businesses, such as marinas and campsites, is constantly improving. Governments and companies in the nautical sector, not only in Europe, are making significant investments in sustainability and pushing for digitalisation.
This is an important basis for saying that smart marinas are not just the future but a current reality. Not only do they deliver a more functional and easy-to-use system, but they are a real response to customer demands and provide a real solution for saving resources.
Our work today mainly consists of making marina managers perceive the added value of a modern and controlled system.
We made a strategic choice, i.e. to put all the core of the CloudEnergy system in the cloud, making all the software open to easy integration with external services. A marina deciding to buy new pedestal infrastructure is making a long term investment (usually over ten to 15 years) and, as no one can imagine what changes will take place over such a long period, the best way to ensure the infrastructure is always up to date – even able to meet future customer needs – is to choose a real cloud-based solution. This is open to being integrated with all external services that could be part of the market in coming years. That’s why we see the pedestal as a technological hub.
Providing our customers with support seven days a week and happily listening to customer needs is the swiftest way to evolve our solution and be up-to-date with market innovations.