ConclusionAMIS ConclusionCasesEnergy company Ennat...

Energy company Ennatuurlijk: Modernizing integrations with Azure

Ennatuurlijk is a supplier of heating, hot water and cooling for consumers and companies in the Netherlands. This is achieved by linking districts and neighbourhoods to local heat sources, ranging from geothermal heat to heat from industry. In this way, they work towards a sustainable future. Ennatuurlijk serves 85,000 customers via 62 heat networks, spread throughout the Netherlands.

Client

Ennatuurlijk

Market

Energy & Utilities

Theme

Factbased improvement

Date published

24 juli 2023

Structural modernization of existing integrations

Ennatuurlijk has an organically grown IT landscape with many point-to-point integrations. These have arisen in the past ten years, partly as a result of acquisitions. This has led to a variety of parties working on integrations, with a lack of central coordination and responsibility across the entire chain. This made maintenance, management and monitoring difficult, and changes costly. As a result, the exchange of information was suboptimal and the correct functioning of the links was monitored to a limited extent. The growing need for data-driven working and the use of analytics for business operations has led to the definition of a new digital architecture.

New architecture as the basis for sustainable integrations

Ennatuurlijk's new architecture is based on future-orientedness, sustainability and continuous improvement. This architecture defines principles for security, innovation, flexibility, collaboration and user experience. The integration solutions of Microsoft Azure were chosen as the basis, which offer continuity, ease of use and reliability. From this point on, the experts at AMIS Conclusion were involved in the process and we made a detailed design for the specific integrations.

Gradual coupling of legacy components

As part of the modernization process, the various legacy components were gradually linked together. In the long term, the existing maintenance management system has been replaced by a new system that uses the same integration solution. A total of twenty integrations have been rerealized and replaced, after which they have been incorporated into a software engineering process, based on Azure DevOps, DTAP monitoring and dashboards.

Flexible phased approach to redesigning integrations

Due to the complex landscape with numerous point-to-point integrations, some of which are based on outdated technology and limited documentation, it was decided to redesign and build the links. Using an agile approach, the new integrations were designed and made suitable for implementation within the possibilities of Azure integrations. During the design process, the AMIS team immediately looked at the usability, testability and maintainability of the couplings. In addition, all built links are directly included in Azure monitoring.

Co-creation stimulates speed and flexibility

By taking a standardized approach to setting up integrations, we were able to efficiently and flexibly replace existing integrations with an alternative Azure solution. This also formed a good basis for new integrations. During the process, the AMIS team worked closely with Ennatuurlijk's employees, who contributed their domain knowledge and company-specific expertise. Jochen van de Leur, Enterprise Architect at Ennatuurlijk, says: "In addition to the usual aspects such as scalability, security and interoperability, we also looked at user experience in our architecture. Microsoft Azure meets these needs well both on the developer side and for the users. The experts at AMIS Conclusion helped us with the design, choosing the right components, practical implementation and monitoring. We now see that both users and developers are using these new integrations with much more ease. And that makes me happy."

Future-proof and easy to manage

The new integrations based on Azure have proven their added value in practice, because they offer Ennatuurlijk better future-proofing and enable better control. Through monitoring, it is possible to receive instant notifications if the integrations are not functioning properly. This allows proactive action, prevents malfunctions and improves the customer experience. Jochen emphasizes: "This new structure forms the basis for a sustainable future for us. We are very satisfied with the practical expertise and acceleration that AMIS Conclusion has brought us."

AMIS Conclusion, leader in system integration

AMIS Conclusion has been making a difference for more than 30 years through a proven approach, aimed at achieving business objectives with IT as a powerful tool. This is how we achieve demonstrable performance improvements with the help of data.