Contino helps Origin Energy zip over to AWS

Contino has helped move Origin Energy over to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of its digital transformation initiative.

The move saw the energy company migrating over 60 per cent of its workloads to the cloud, including mission-critical functionality like billing, customer care, energy trading and operations management, as well as its enterprise data lake.

By doing so, Contino established a framework that will allow Origin to migrate additional workloads into the cloud, as well as providing skills and best practices for the energy company to support current and future cloud activities.

The cloud consultancy and AWS partner helped with the move in order to assist Origin with its goal of operating 100 per cent in the cloud by 2022.

Through the implementation of AWS cloud technology, Origin has seen billing processing times reduced by 30 per cent, improved operational report run times by 84 per cent and cut the cost of running technology infrastructure in half.

During the project, Contino enabled the energy company to deliver resources at speed and scale and implement modern delivery practices, according to Origin. 

The consultancy also helped establish a cloud development and management methodology and updated custom applications to cloud-native technologies.

Nick Andrews, group manager for cloud and infrastructure for Origin, said that 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,” he said.

“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.”

Andrews added that taking on digitisation initiatives like the cloud migration has resulted in “a significant improvement in the functionality of our digital platforms”.

“As the sector continues to transition towards cleaner and smarter energy solutions for customers, the importance of technology to improve operational processes only grows,” he said.

“AWS provides us with access to the latest and best technology that helps us to accelerate our digital transformation and supports us to give our customers what they want, when they want it.”

Karl Durrance, director of enterprise for AWS in Australia and New Zealand, said the cloud giant is committed to help Origin use technologies like data analytics and machine learning (ML) for business operations and assisting customers.

Origin has been utilising AWS technologies since 2016, including for services such as data analytics, ML, business productivity applications, compute, security, storage and databases.

The energy company also trades electricity and gas with software built on AWS with serverless technology due to a recent migration of its asset intelligence suite. This allows its support centre teams to identify maintenance or operational disruptions with predictive analytics and run the assets remotely.

Furthermore, Origin has been working with AWS, along with other technology providers, as part of a Cloud Academy training and enablement program for employees to work with cloud and ML technologies.

Access will be provided to over 500 employees, with the aim of certifying over 100 by July 2020.

“Cloud skills play an increasingly important role in the workforce and Origin’s Cloud Academy program will not only provide a foundation that will accelerate the company’s own digital transformation, but help employees enhance their overall career potential,” Durrance added.

Origin has been looking to shift workloads into the cloud since September 2019, when DXC Technology showed off a proof of concept (PoC).

In the PoC, approximately 100 workloads were moved into the VMware Cloud on AWS environments.