On 7 June 2021, a press conference was held to present the fifth edition of the ‘Premio Costruiamo il Futuro Milano Citta Metropolitana’ (Building the Future Milan Metropolitan City Award), an initiative created to provide concrete support for sports associations’ efforts and projects in Milan and its province.

Safety21 is supporting the event for the second year, as it has always believed in and supported projects that generate value for the community, for sport and for the region.

Since the initiative was launched in 2003, over 600 clubs have been supported, €950,000 has been donated to projects and over 2,500 associations have been involved.

In 2020, the Foundation received 546 requests for grants. This number has almost doubled compared to previous years, showing that many organisations are facing great difficulties, also due to the Covid-19 emergency.

This is why the Foundation, with the support of private companies like Safety21, has set itself the challenging goal of supporting the activities of 50 sports associations – double the number of associations compared to the previous year – thus supporting the most significant education and training projects for young people and ensuring they have healthy meeting places that help prevent hardship and alienation.

Link to the Lombardy Region TRG service.

On 9 June, Sodi Academy, in partnership with Safety21, held its first online event, an exclusive professional training course for law enforcement officers.

Road Safety was the main focus of the webinar, with a particular emphasis on the innovations introduced by the Simplification Decree. The emphasis was on ensuring that standardisation and approval procedures for detection tools are identical.

The discussion topic was addressed by various speakers: Stefano Guarnieri from the Lorenzo Guarnieri Onlus Association who tackled road safety from a human and scientific point of view, starting from the concept of speed and the numerous accidents that occur every day; Enrico Vecchioni presented Sodi Scientifica and its products; Paolo Tommasini from Safety21 commented on the latest data on European road accidents and illustrated our Financing Project for the Metropolitan City of Milan; and Dr Luigi Altamura explained the changes introduced to Traffic Law by the Simplification Decree.

The webinar provided new insights into the issues that arise every day in the detection tools sector.

New and interesting webinars are in the pipeline, aimed at informing and simplifying the work of those involved in maintaining road safety.

As part of the “Metropolitan Milan Safety Project”, the long-term road safety and regional protection programme developed by Safety21 for the Metropolitan City of Milan, special attention is given to video surveillance systems as active tools for monitoring and operational support for law enforcement authorities in surveying the local area and tracking offences.

To this end, Safety21 relies on Axis technology, which provides mixed and integrated protection solutions featuring IP cameras with on-board analytics and 360° cameras, which not only have the ability to detect data and information across a wide range of formats, but can also detect environmental crimes or specific events, such as offences or accidents near pedestrian crossings. The cameras actively communicate with the Titan® ecosystem – a fully AgiD (Agency for Digital Italy)-certified solution – which manages all the region’s IoT control devices in the cloud.

Thanks to the partnership between Axis and Safety21, the Metropolitan City of Milan is now able to monitor the main roads that connect the municipalities in its area by CCTV, receiving information in real-time and thus simplifying the decision-making and response process.

Case history

IoT and video cameras for monitoring

Within two years, the Metropolitan Milan Safety Project will see the installation of 310 IoT (Internet of Things) devices throughout its region. Some of these devices will be used to detect speeding, while the others will be divided between pedestrian crossing control, lay-by monitoring and radar traffic analysis systems. On the project website you can consult the up-to-date map showing the detection points as they are installed.

Safety21 is the contractor entrusted with implementing this initiative, which will make the Metropolitan City of Milan one of the leading cities in the world in terms of safety and supervision. More of the 350 Italian municipalities which Safety21 works with may follow suit in the future, as additional services can easily be upgraded for authorities that already use Titan, Safety21’s modular cloud software platform. To develop one of the modules that are currently already operational in the Milan project, the company called on the expertise of the Beta 80 Group, an Italian system integrator that works alongside businesses through its three business units: ICT Services & Solutions, Supply Chain & Warehouse Management and Emergency & Crisis Management. “The module,” explained Gianluca Longo, Founder and CEO of Safety21, “takes the form of a number of solutions that use artificial intelligence on board IP cameras to connect with our platform and Microsoft’s Azure cloud.”

In practice, this can take the form of video surveillance of pedestrian crossings, for example, as well as of lay-bys to prevent the dumping of waste and other objects. “It serves not only as a deterrent, but also as a sanctioning tool,” the CEO continued. “The camera’s artificial intelligence module allows it to detect when a vehicle has been parked for a period of time deemed to be non-standard, and records movements that might mean an object has been dumped.” From this, an alert is generated that is linked to the cloud platform and allows photographic evidence of the offence to be ‘clipped’.

Link to the Digital4 article

The dedicated IoT platform and the Microsoft Azure Cloud are the ingredients that Safety21 brings to the table to offer control, monitoring and road safety services in cities. A new ecosystem approach that starts with Milan

Protecting the area, caring for the environment, tackling offences such as waste dumping, particularly in lay-bys, and increasing road safety: these are the key goals of the “Metropolitan Milan Safety Project” which was announced in Milan at the beginning of December.

These ambitious goals can be achieved through the use of innovative video surveillance systems, smart applications, the Internet of Things and the Cloud, enabling intelligent analysis of controlled areas, new alert systems for pedestrian crossings and targeted traffic monitoring, accompanied by measures to reduce pressure in the most congested areas.

This complex project is now the pride and joy of Safety21, which has been awarded the contract for the next 11 years, together with Municipia, a company belonging to the Engineering Group.

“This is probably the most impressive project we have developed for our clients to date and marks a further step in the direction of smart cities, without relinquishing our core business – the outsourced management of traffic offences”, commented Gianluca Longo, Founder and CEO of Safety21.

Read the whole article

On 10 October, the award ceremony of the ‘Building the Future’ Foundation, which Safety21 is a partner and supporter of, was held at the Marriot Hotel in Milan.

The ‘Building the Future’ Award was launched in 2003, and supports small and medium-sized third sector organisations operating in the social and sports sectors in Lombardy, with separate tenders for each Lombardy province.

Helping those who help: in recent years, 500 associations have been awarded prizes, with more than €1 million distributed to set up community projects in the region. Even during the Covid emergency this year, the Foundation presented awards to 27 organisations that have been working with the most vulnerable, distributing €60,000 to associations operating within the Metropolitan City of Milan.

These associations have distinguished themselves through their ongoing commitment to the disabled and the very young, and financial support for their educational work will greatly benefit the whole community, especially during these times of pandemic.

Link to the Lombardy Region TRG service

Lawfulness and transparency, combined with innovation and the continuous technological development of our TITAN® platform, are the foundations of our business.

In the era of Big Data, Cyber Security and Privacy Protection, managing the data collected and emitted by an increasing number of IoT technology tools is a key asset for companies like us that are participating in the Digital Transformation of road safety.

Against this backdrop, the evolution of SaaS services technology must go hand in hand with adhering to obligations concerning personal data protection, traceability and confidentiality guarantees, as well as guaranteeing outsourcing services that players such as Safety21 are called upon to provide through infrastructure and processes that comply with national and international standards.

The TITAN® platform offers a range of advantages for organisations that choose it: a single management tool that is integrated with offence detection devices and with the main external services (MCTC, SaNa, Visure PRA, EUCARIS, pagoPA), combined with simultaneous management of penalties and enforcement of unpaid fines – Italian and foreign – as well as processing of real-time statistics, guaranteeing efficiency and total control of the organisation’s operations.

The AgiD certification obtained for the TITAN® platform guarantees compliance with the organisational requirements for Public Administrations, including:

• Provision of a structured customer support service capable of covering the operational needs that may arise when providing the proposed services
• Guarantee of a proven and reliable process that can ensure software is continually updated for the solutions provided in SaaS mode
• Adoption of industry ‘best practices’ in developing, configuring and maintaining software to implement the services provided
• Service levels guaranteed at 99.9%

As well as some key Platform-specific requirements, such as:

• Security: The TITAN® platform is certified to ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011; ISO/IEC 27001:2013; ISO/IEC 27017:2015; ISO/IEC 27018:2019
• Service status alert systems with SMS/email notifications
• Scalability
• Interoperability with other systems
• Reversibility
• Mobile use
• Integration with certified online payment systems
• Provision of a native Business Intelligence tool

Our AgiD-certified TITAN® platform is now also available for Public Administrations on the AgiD Marketplace at the following link

There has been a change in leadership at ServiceNet21. Safety21’s former Business Developer Manager, Paolo Tommasini, has succeeded Gianluca Longo, who will remain on the Board of Directors of the company founded in 2018 to provide Public Administrations with innovative road safety systems. The company also moved its operational headquarters to La Spezia last May.

With his appointment as CEO of ServiceNet21, Paolo Tommasini will head up the growth of the company, which operates in Liguria, Piedmont, Tuscany and Lombardy and was set up to strengthen the Group’s expansion in northern Italy by offering small and medium-sized Public Authorities the most advanced technologies and outsourcing services for improving road safety.

Commenting on his appointment, Tommasini said:

“I am proud to lead a company as strategic for the Group as ServiceNet21, a company that embodies not only the business model but also Safety21’s vision of the future of road safety in key regions such as Liguria, Piedmont, Tuscany and Lombardy, where, in just over a year, it has already developed important projects both in terms of installed tools and the digital transformation of safety from a smart city perspective, for example, by equipping local administrations with the TITAN cloud platform. At ServiceNet21, we will not fail to promote digital innovation in road safety as a development theme in the region, including through events that can generate reflection on the opportunities that technology now offers for the future of our cities.”

Born in 1968, with a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Paolo Tommasini has a background in professional sports, having taken part in numerous World Championships and the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Alongside his sporting career with the Fiamme Gialle group, he obtained an Honours Degree in Sport Management from Nottingham Trent University. On leaving the sports arena, he held a management position at a company involved in developing an innovative renewable energy project, before joining Safety21 in 2013 as Business Development Manager.

The growth of the Safety21 Group was showcased as a success story during the latest conference on the theme of business globalisation organised in Milan by AIFI, the Italian Association of Private Equity, Venture Capital and Private Debt, together with Intesa Sanpaolo.

The event, which was held behind closed doors on 24 October, hosted a reflection on the relationship between capital operations and increased globalisation of companies, based on the results of research conducted by LIUC-Cattaneo University studying 119 companies that completed an expansion or buy-out operation in Italy between 2006 and 2015.

In this context, the growth of Safety21 – from a promising scale-up to a globally-oriented Group, through the support of the Private Equity HAT – was presented by Isabella Lauro, Executive Director of Safety21, who highlighted the key steps along this path from the first participation of the HAT fund in 2016 to the significant projects that have been achieved thanks to it this year. These include the capital increase aimed at growth through acquisitions, and the acquisition, last June, of the company Multiservizi, whose established foreign market operations expand the Group’s business even further abroad, thus increasing its international reach in the search for new markets.

Safety21, together with Multiservizi, is also taking part in the 16th National Local Police Forum to be held on 14 and 15 November in Pescantina, in the province of Verona. Using a well-established format, the conference at Villa Quaranta will address current issues and topics of interest to local police authorities over its two days, with the participation of local and national authorities.

This event is an important opportunity for our Group, which also has a stand, to present its outsourcing services for complete management and collection of fines from foreign offenders and international debt collection, offered to local police authorities.

These are services that Safety21 brought in-house with the acquisition last spring of Multiservizi, a leader in the sector, and which allow Local Police and Public Authorities to manage the entire process of every single offence in a transparent way and in real-time through a single operator, optimising timescales and procedures.