Aerodyne and Dron-e collaborate to tap US$900mil Italian asset inspection market

• No JV set-up, rather Aerodyne to offer its technology via SaaS & DaaS
• Italian market maturing, big players understand value of drone usage

Aerodyne Group, a top-tier DT3 (Drone Tech, Data Tech, and Digital Transformation) drone-based enterprise solutions provider and Easy City Srl (known as Dron-e) announced a collaboration to offer Drone-as-a-Service (Daas) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in the Italian asset inspection market for infrastructure maintenance and agriculture.

This strategic partnership was driven by the need to leverage on Aerodyne’s capability in SaaS and Dron-e’s existing inspections expertise throughout southern Europe. Dron-e has conducted numerous aerial survey and mapping projects in various sectors, including Oil & Gas, Infrastructure, Media & Entertainment, Utility & Power, Security and Mining in Italy and around the world, such as Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

Founder and Group CEO of Aerodyne, Kamarul A. Muhamed (pic) said, “This strategic collaboration is synergistic and will allow both parties to service the US$17 billion (€14 billion¹) works planned in the Italian and pan-European electricity grid segment for the next ten-year period. We have positioned ourselves to tap into the Italian infrastructure inspection market which we estimate to be about US$900 million in 2020 and forecasted to grow annually by 3% in the next 5 years.”

Technical Director of Dron-e, Antonio Mazza said, “Together with Aerodyne we have taken the survey of assets and infrastructures to a higher level, including among the first in the world the use of UAV Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) with SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) technology in our inspection processes. The Italian market is maturing and the big players have well understood the effectiveness of the integration of drones in their business, maintenance and production processes.”

Aerodyne employs over 500 drone professionals globally and offers an AI-powered cloud-based asset management solution – vertikaliti - to harness the value from drone data, providing deep analytics and actionable insights to help industries with their optimisation goals.

Kamarul notes that vertikaliti has been successful across all the industries Aerodyne works in with 15% lower costs and 4x faster inspection times for assert monitoring via drones.

Since 2014, Aerodyne has managed more than 320,000 infrastructure assets with 110,000 flight operations and managing over 120,000 km of power infrastructure across 35 countries globally.

Aerodyne has also been providing digital asset intelligence for the power generation, transmission and telecommunications industries to efficiently manage large-scale infrastructures. Prescriptive asset intelligence is also made available with relevant data aggregated to multiple levels of decision-makers. This agile and scalable service reduces costs and improves reliability by minimizing downtime.