Objective
One of the world’s largest sustainable energy solutions providers partnered with Nuvalence to create a foundation for future growth and extensibility in energy analytics capabilities by adopting a modern cloud architecture and digital platform strategy.
Key Results
- Digital Platform Strategy & Development
- Technology & Infrastructure Assessment
- AWS Cloud Expertise
- Multi-tenant SaaS & Serverless Architecture
- IOT Streaming Analaytics Dashboards
- Operational Efficiency
- Platform Launch & Go-To-Market
Providing Sustainable Energy Globally
Utopus Insights is a subsidiary of Vestas and one of the world’s largest sustainable energy solutions providers. The New York-based company, with Vestas’s backing, continues to operate independently, leveraging a portfolio of over 100 issued and applied patents, alongside machine learning and artificial intelligence expertise to optimize performance and improve operations of renewable energy assets. As they set out to create their next-generation SaaS energy analytics platform (to support wind and solar assets), Utopus Insights partnered with Nuvalence to accelerate delivery and adopt a modern cloud architecture and software engineering process.
Client Challenge: Moving from Products to Platforms
While their competitors were releasing bespoke products targeting individual markets, Utopus had a much bigger ambition. Their customers were asking for a comprehensive suite of energy analytics capabilities spanning renewable energy sources and use cases. In order to meet customer demand and create a foundation for future growth and extensibility, Utopus needed to shift to a digital platform strategy and cloud architecture.
“We knew we had to rethink how we delivered software. We couldn’t just churn out new products every quarter. We needed to create a single shared cloud platform as the vehicle to deliver our value to customers. We needed better engineering leverage and a more effective go-to-market approach.”
Neil Desai, Chief Product Officer at Utopus Insights
Why Nuvalence? A Strategic Partnership
Utopus has its origins in IBM’s Smarter Energy Research Institute, with 15 years of experience in energy software solutions development. With this pedigree, Utopus already had a staff of talented engineers and data scientists and needed a partner with the horsepower to work alongside them and accelerate delivery.
“We have a great team here but Nuvalence’s deep expertise in building and bringing commercial-grade cloud platforms to market gave our team the skills and momentum that we needed.”
Neil Desai, Chief Product Officer at Utopus Insights
One of the world’s largest sustainable energy solutions providers partners with Nuvalence to adopt a modern cloud architecture & digital platform offering
Solving Hard Technical Problems
The Utopus Insights platform had several important technical and business requirements that needed to be met on day 1. Specifically, the platform would need to:
- Support processing 55 billion signals a day, all of which needed to be aggregated, enriched and normalized
- Provide real-time insight into the operations and performance of solar, wind and other energy system assets to any device in a variety of languages
- Be built as a secure multi-tenant SaaS architecture
- Employ architectural patterns applicable across a spectrum of Utopus products
- Be delivered on a very aggressive timeline
In partnership with the Utopus technical team, Nuvalence designed and delivered a platform solution running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud using Apache Kafka, ElasticSearch, AWS Kinesis, AWS EMR, and custom microservices built using a serverless architecture with AWS Lambda to power the back end. A set of responsive, localizable, and reusable front-end components were built to be shared across Utopus applications using the Angular 7 framework.
“Aside from delivering on our vision, Nuvalence showed us how to adopt a more efficient method of software delivery. We could not have asked for a better partner.”
Neil Desai, Chief Product Officer at Utopus Insights
Accomplishments
The Nuvalence partnership helped Utopus accelerate delivery of Scipher™, its next generation energy analytics platform, which was met with an enthusiastic customer response.
Key Results
- Before partnering with Nuvalence, Utopus had hoped to deliver wind energy support in their initial release of Scipher. By shifting to a shared cloud-native digital platform, Utopus was able to provide capabilities for both solar and wind markets in the same timeframe, enabling them to leapfrog their competitors
- Utopus got to market with a digital platform-based offering well ahead of their competition. With the help of Nuvalence, they have set a durable foundation for the future through a platform architecture and strategy.