Working together on an adaptive and connected enterprise

Eneco's mission statement is ‘Everyone's sustainable energy’.

Their statement comes with two promises

1. If energy belongs to everyone, it must always be available. Simply put: if the supply of electricity and heat must be guaranteed, many systems in the company are business-critical. This requires a mission-critical business partner for the entire IT landscape.
2. To supply sustainable energy, Eneco continually invests in green production methods such as wind turbines, solar energy, and sustainable gas. Naturally, these methods must be effectively integrated into the total infrastructure.

As a technological enabler, we support Eneco in its efforts to become an adaptive and connected enterprise. As time goes on, we further substantiate this role with an increasing level of business value to Eneco.

Our journey began with a number of technological innovations and services to make the IT landscape more adaptive. We started gradually connecting and managing more and more things, in-house and externally. Creating these connections provided significant added value to Eneco's business opportunities. But how did we get here? Let's start from the beginning.

More than three years ago, Eneco decided that its data records and infrastructure were too complex and outdated to quickly and sufficiently support the development of sustainable energy solutions. The need for more agility, flexibility and scalability encouraged Eneco to create a more future-proof IT landscape. Following our advice, Eneco was one of the first companies – in the world – to move from SAP to the public cloud via Microsoft Azure. We took care of the entire migration and provided the services to maintain the platform, including a technological roadmap to the future.

The migration made people pay attention for a number of reasons. Firstly, we were a pioneer when it came to the migrating process. Another reason was that we completed the migration in a surprisingly short time – in only seven weeks. Furthermore, because the seamless transition quickly gave Eneco access to its new and future-proof environment in which it saw significant performance gains. These achievements paved the way forward for further innovation.

We have now also successfully completed and managed the migration from SAP to the Oracle Cloud for Eneco Belgium. This means that we have expanded our services on SAP and the public cloud in an international context.

As we redeveloped Eneco's IT landscape by migrating from SAP, we also migrated their Operational Technology (OT). Their OT is very complex due to the many connections to external assets such as wind farms and combined heat and power (CHP) plants. We completed this migration by the designing a flexible private cloud platform. Eneco's OT environment is near to their Trading environment, this means both are mission-critical.

Our approach to management works towards a future-proof platform – one that's resilient and agile – by using technological solutions such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SAAS) services in the public cloud and through the digital transformation of a large number of applications.

The projects we mentioned above were the start of a partnership that has expanded greatly over the past two-and-a-half years. Eneco has now transferred their entire Trading environment to Conclusion: it's three times the size of their OT environment. As a technological enabler, we want to make our partner faster and more future-proof in these environments. By managing both environments, we can optimize Eneco's technological potential to add extra value to their business goals. The expansion of our collaboration demonstrates the trust in our partnership which characterizes the entire journey we take together towards innovation.

Eneco's enormous diversity of assets created a demand for a central platform to make better use of the data from all those assets. An Internet of Things (IoT) platform is adaptive and connects to multiple environments and different types of applications and business-specific applications. This platform benefits Eneco by offering the potential of standardizing as many processes as possible, strengthening its competitive position, and better meeting the demands Eneco's customers. We have developed and managed the process of taking the IoT-on-Azure environment from a minimum viable product (MVP) to a mature platform to which new assets and features are added daily. This is done to ensure more reporting and data use while also providing assets with better stratagems and all this in an increasingly real-time manner.

The IoT platform marks the next step towards the sustainable energy supply that Eneco strives to achieve. Many different devices are connected to the platform: from smart energy devices for consumers to wind turbines for green energy production. At Eneco, the IoT platform provides the basis for improved business services such as stabilized energy consumption within the network, a more accurate prediction of supply and demand, and improved insight into short-term use and peak loads. For consumers and companies alike, this means higher reliability and greater ease. Eneco is making itself and its processes 'smarter’ both for internal efficiency and to ensure that individuals at home as well as companies reduce their energy consumption and are more conscientious of their energy consumption.

All these options enable Eneco to develop innovative business cases and revenue models that make full use of its position as a partner in sustainable energy.

In order to optimally use and exchange data in different environments, systems, and platforms; an overarching central platform is needed. The innovative Event Streaming Platform (ESP) based on Azure's Apache Kafka was our solution. Conclusion developed this cloud-based platform for Eneco together with our partner – and Apache Kafka expert – Axual. The ESP connects many environments, ensuring that all systems from which valuable data can be used are linked. With this platform, Conclusion makes it possible for Eneco to grow into a truly adaptive and connected enterprise. Implementing this ESP underlines Eneco's ambition to be a data-driven and future-oriented organization.

Working towards becoming a data-driven organization means serving the customer and following Eneco's mission statement: Everyone's sustainable energy.

The ESP makes real-time retrieval possible, which can be used in combination with the IoT, analytics, and guidance in order to better meet the heating needs of households and companies. This 20-30% potential reduction in energy consumption is a new step towards making the Netherlands more sustainable.

Conclusion serves its clients through our unique ecosystem of IT and business oriented companies. Each one is an authority in its field. By deploying such expertise in a targeted manner, we work to help you become resilient, agile, and distinct.

The four projects we talked about above are labelled in our ecosystem accordingly

The Event Streaming Platform (ESP) was developed by Conclusion Mission-Critical in partnership Axual. Conclusion chose Axual because it had an already-developed platform built around Apache Kafka – which Eneco had chosen as the basis for the ESP.

• Conclusion Future Infrastructure technologies
• Conclusion Amis
• Conclusion Mission Critical

Eneco will continue to make full use of the power our ecosystem offers in current and future projects. Over ten labels in our ecosystem are now being used in the services we provide to Eneco.