Origin Energy Partners With Contino for Its Cloud Migration Journey
About the Client
Origin is one of Australia’s leading energy retailers and one of the most significant energy producers in the country.
The future of the energy sector is data driven and digital. Origin’s Cloud 2022 vision was a response to this new business paradigm. Contino is very pleased to be working alongside Origin to achieve its vision to move its application portfolio to the Cloud.
The Opportunity
Origin is in the driving seat for technical innovation in an ever-evolving energy market where competition across B2B and B2C energy sales continues to increase.
Origin is focused on:
- A Cloud strategy to enable more agility, elasticity, resilience and efficiency, as well as to optimise operating costs by moving away from physical data centres
- Achieving a successful transformation through continuous cost optimisation, service consolidation, lean management of services, improved ways of working and agility in response to regulatory changes
“Contino has been a true partner with us on our Cloud migration journey. Not only has it brought essential deep domain level capabilities across the AWS platform, but it has helped us strengthen our Cloud migration delivery framework through agile working practices. As a partner, it continually challenges our thinking and status quo, with the aim of optimising and enhancing our Cloud adoption journey. We are one delivery team with Contino integrating seamlessly into our own teams. It has assisted us in raising our own capabilities, and we now stand to realise more value from our Cloud journey over the coming years.
Nick Andrews, Group Manager Cloud & Infrastructure Services
The Solution
Working in close partnership, Contino and Origin formed collaborative cross-functional teams to enable rapid adoption of Cloud across all application portfolios. Contino brought a range of Cloud architecture practices, deep AWS domain competency and experience, and partnered with Origin on refactoring, replatforming, and leveraging the AWS Managed Services (AMS) landing zone.
During the project, Contino was pivotal in delivering the following outcomes for Origin:
- Established cross-functional delivery squads with blended Contino and Origin resources empowered to deliver at speed and scale
- Established modern delivery practices leveraging the frameworks of Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe
- Brought a practical Agile framework, aligning the squads to the principles and values of Agile and LEAN, while also enabling strong project hygiene
- Led the application discovery squad to define treatment plans and ensure a pipeline of applications for the migration delivery teams
- Enable Origin development and Cloud operations teams to be more self sustaining via our dual delivery and upskilling methodology.
- Establish a Cloud development and management methodology
- Re-architect custom developed applications to cloud-native technologies (serverless)
- Uplifted applications to modern frameworks
- Construction and deployment of new CI/CD pipelines, compliant with modern industry standards
- Re-platform servers to the latest operating system version
The Business Outcome
Together, Contino and Origin have established a framework that will allow Origin to rapidly migrate future waves of applications to the Cloud. Alongside, they have developed the skills and best practices to support ongoing operations in the Cloud.
Business benefits realisation:
Speed to Market
- AWS’ global infrastructure footprint enables reduced application latency improving the user experience
- We are now able to make changes to our applications in near real time and deploy updates to production within minutes
- Having the ability to deploy sandbox environments quickly means that we can innovate at pace and bring features to customers more quickly and at a higher quality than ever before
Resource Optimisation
- The scalability of our Cloud operations means that we can run the same workloads for less
- We no longer need to guess capacity requirements and over-provision resources for applications, leveraging right-sizing and auto-scaling capabilities
- With requests routed to the nearest edge location, content is now delivered faster
Operational Efficiency
- The team can now primarily focus on customer improvements over break fixes
- Enhancement in transparency, being utility based
- Economies of scale with lower infrastructure costs
- Online response times are 20% faster on day 1 “The whole team noticed an improvement in performance… data is flowing a lot faster… very smooth transition from the team with no issues or delays. Thanks for the good job here.” Manager Data Analytical Engineering, Energy markets
- Report run times have improved by up to 84% “The highlight was the report run time has dramatically improved saving 52 man hours a year in this one report alone.” Market Settlements Analyst, Wholesale Risk & Business Services
- 30% improvement in batch processing times “Thanks for the upgrade, seems to have shaved 30% of my day’s processing times” Senior Forecasting Analysis, Energy Markets - Strategy & Commercial
