Contact Energy moves to AWS Cloud

Contact Energy Limited (Contact) is a New Zealand electricity generator, natural gas wholesaler and electricity, natural gas, broadband and LPG retailer.

The company is the second-largest electricity generator in New Zealand with over 4 billion dollars in assets across 10 generation sites and a retail customer base of over 400,000 connections.

Contact operates a complex suite of critical business applications to manage and support its generation

Overview

The energy industry is demanding. Changes in customer expectations, regulatory pressures, weather, unforeseen outages, all with an ongoing imperative to increase operational efficiencies in a highly competitive market.

  • Contact incumbent IT Infrastructure wasn’t in-line with Contact’s strategic direction
  • High-cost on-premise IT infrastructure and support model
  • Lack of integration offered little insight and data intelligence
  • Unable to respond to customers changing needs
  • Service offering stagnated and fell behind its competitors
  • Inability to progress internal improvement opportunities

Client Specifications

Contact was seeking to reduce its operating costs whilst improving operational safety and performance. It also wanted to gain more value from its data and used this to transform its service offering to be more competitive.Contact’s existing IT architecture was somewhat cumbersome and outdated, with many different vendors providing critical point solutions which did not integrate easily. This complexity and perceived risk impacted Contact’s ability to adapt and progress cohesively or gain insights from its data.

“Energy companies must constantly develop and improve their intelligence. Intelligence takes data and puts into context our business and customer needs. Good intelligence enables us to leverage patterns for identifying opportunities and threats ahead of time”.

Strategy, Goals and Results

Any system loss or downtime had the potential to cost our client millions and put safety at risk. Applications couldn’t simply be lifted and shifted with little consideration of a number of factors, a thorough test strategy and the ability to roll-back quickly was critical to

Our approach

Digital Transformation provided the leadership, planning, design architecture and execution of the transition; along with managing service aggregation across numerous other vendors, communicating with business users and third parties throughout to ensure successful delivery. Grouping applications and data-flows by common inputs and outputs; and through working closely across business units to understand data and people transactions, allowed the Digital Transformation to move applications in waves grouped by common needs with minimal disruption to normal operations. As a result, Digital Transformation ushered in a new era for Contact and enabled their client to realise a long-awaited new operating model which immediately resulted in reduced operating costs. Contact now had the technical capability they desired and platform from which they could confidently and safely move forward.

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