Overview
- Based in NSW, they are the largest distributor of electricity on Australia’s east coast
- A network spanning 22,275 square kilometres
- Serving 1.7m customers
- 3,200 Employees
- $2.5B in Revenue
The Challenge
Ausgrid were aware of the value the data they were collecting held but they needed help with making the right choice on a platform to help improve efficiency and decision-making and help realise their vision to become a leading energy solutions provider. But they were overwhelmed with options for their Big Data Platform Program.
Even narrowing the field down by selecting leading vendors with enterprise capability, Ausgrid were still left with many questions; “What’s right for our users? What’s right for the data we curate and collect? What about security? What fits our cloud strategy? How will this integrate across our landscape? How much does it cost? How do we navigate through all these choices?
Our Solution
From the outset the approach taken was to ensure that Ausgrid’s Big Data Platform vision would be realised. It wasn’t enough to just present options, because there’s no value in an options paper until the chosen option is implemented and of value to the business.
To stay focussed the approach was broken into five logical steps:
1. Market Assessment
The assessment navigated the vast number of options in the market by evaluating against the criteria that really mattered to Ausgrid. To ensure alignment and fairness, it was vital to agree upon the evaluation criteria from the outset.
2. Proof of Concept
The Proof of Concept helped road-test the selected option as well as providing something more tangible to win the hearts and minds of stakeholders.
3. Business Case
The business case provided a clear focus on financial benefit. This is notoriously difficult for data and analytics solutions where the value is often more intangible, enabling new insights and future capability. For this reason, the Ausgrid business case provided “hard cash” benefits through the consolidation and move from existing legacy data platforms, whilst also providing the strategic “soft cash” benefits that future use cases would deliver.
4. Solution Design
As Ausgrid was new to the idea of cloud-based analytics, there were many concerns to address with the solution around cloud readiness.
The detailed design helped address these concerns:
- How will cloud and on-premise data sources integrate?
- How secure will the data be? Including encryption, access and ring-fencing considerations.
- How can we estimate cost for budgeting? How can we allocate costs to enable chargeback models?
5. Implementation
Endorsement of the detailed design paved the way for a smooth implementation, although it was important to be willing to learn and adjust as the cloud environment, tools and approach were new to Ausgrid.
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
Ignite implement an integrated data platform that enables the core building blocks for your use cases. Our Data Platform Build Service delivers:
- Implementation of your systems, components, and environments design
- Integration with your other core applications
- Security design including role design and AD integration
- Data modelling, and development, standards and guidelines
- Core ingestion and data transformation services
- Code and release management
- Test strategy, test scripts and documentation
- Deployed interfaces and base data models for critical datasets
- As-built solution documentation and component configuration
- Ongoing operations guide and operations team upskilling
- People change management plan
“We would recommend Ignite due to their ability to adapt to the client’s needs, industry knowledge and subject matter technical expertise. They also were able to bring the right resource for the right engagement.”
Results
Through a shortlisting and selection process, we enabled Ausgrid in choosing a Microsoft Azure analytics ecosystem. The Microsoft Azure capability suited Ausgrid’s current and future needs as an energy services and solutions provider and aligned as a vendor which already had a significant footprint at Ausgrid.
Their new solution enables scale, capability, and energy data scenarios – both current and future – that were not previously possible, such as:
- Readiness for 5-minute energy settlements, to ensure handling of the volume and velocity.
- Streaming and analysing meter data, enabling capability for real-time energy insights.
- Improving energy data services for customers.
- Capability to store and process unstructured data types such as Lidar and images which are essential for energy services.
- Allowing consolidation and total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of disparate data platforms and capability.
“The narrative has now changed, we’re now discussing the data, not the technology to enable it.”
Ajay Mehta, Program Manager – Business Analytics & Innovation
Where to next?
The platform now implemented in Microsoft Azure is an enabler for Ausgrid, allowing them to focus on getting the data right for cross-business needs.
Led by executives and data champions, Ausgrid is adapting to provide an ecosystem that encourages each employee to use data and the insights it creates to act sooner and more effectively.
