In this ever-evolving digital landscape, organizations face the critical challenge of keeping pace with rapid digitisation whilst also ensuring service reliability, security, scalability, and performance. By embracing cloud, Jemena has been able to transform how digital platforms and services are enabled and managed, better respond to the changing needs of the business, uplift capability and provide new and exciting career pathways for its people. To help deliver this vision, Jemena chose to partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Deloitte: two experienced partners who would help the company transition its infrastructure to the cloud.
Here’s how Jemena’s cloud migration is redefining digital transformations in the utilities sector.
Jemena is a veteran of the energy sector, bringing over a century of experience to the table, but due to the evolving energy landscape they needed to move their operations to the cloud – requiring a major digital transformation. It made sense, then, that the key decision-makers were determined to ensure it would be grounded in two distinct areas: sustainability and customer-centricity. Jemena’s vision to create sustainable energy solutions with communities aligns with its goal of making interactions between customers and the company as seamless as possible.
She adds that the company is always seeking new ways to digitise interactions and give customers the ability to engage via their everyday devices.
Recognising the pivotal role that technology plays in our daily lives, Capraro says Jemena wanted a platform that would foster flexibility, scalability and rapid adaptability. “We needed a technology platform that enables us to move at pace, to meet the demands of our changing business needs, but also our energy transition.”
It’s this vision that drove Jemena to engage in a transformative cloud migration, marking a major shift in its operational structure.
“Our customer mission is to ensure that our customers have a seamless experience when they deal with Jemena”
- Julien Jovancevski Capraro, Chief Digital Officer at Jemena.
“This was a transformational project for us. We migrated our entire corporate environment to AWS – over 150 corporate applications and 700 servers, three petabytes of data and more. We did all of that within 12 months."
- Cory Wilson, General Manager – Enterprise Technology, Jemena
Given the magnitude of the project and the complexity of a digital transformation of this size, Jemena’s migration to the cloud demanded collaborations of strategic proportions, with AWS and Deloitte both key enablers of this transformation.
Off the back of a proven track record with AWS and Deloitte, this collaboration set the stage for a migration to the cloud. Moving to the cloud has allowed Jemena to reimagine its operational structure. This, in turn, has created a remarkable shift in the organisation’s capability, scalability and agility. “Moving to the cloud allows us the scalability, the flexibility and the resilience that we require for running critical infrastructure,” Capraro says. “What’s really helpful and certainly gives us reassurance around our resiliency plans for our digital assets is the uptime that the AWS platform gives us.”
The finishing touch of Jemena’s cloud migration involved the development and implementation of an automated, real-time DR solution. It not only saves time but also gives Jemena the ability to quickly respond to any potential disruptions.
Deloitte was a natural choice for Jemena. A long history of successful collaborations gave Jemena the belief that any shift to new operations would be better served with Deloitte at the helm.
Niko Karaula, Enterprise Account Executive at Amazon Web Services highlights how the agility of cloud services supports scalability and cost saving: “It allows Jemena to spin up services as they need them and shut down those services when they're not required."
Deloitte's comprehensive program management and technological prowess, coupled with AWS's cutting-edge technology, became a winning combo that aligned perfectly with Jemena’s cloud-migration goals.
Operating in the cloud has given Jemena the freedom to pivot its focus from managing infrastructure to driving business innovation. “We're doing more important work now with the business,” Wilson says.
Jemena has been able to redirect its efforts to more value-driven tasks, such as bringing services to market faster and leveraging the extensive AWS ecosystem for innovative ventures. Blamey says all this contributes to greater business value.
“When we’re building a business case, typically with Deloitte and a customer, we look at the complete portfolio of the customer’s technology estate and establish what the cost would be to run that on AWS services. That’s not just the cost of the computer or database services, it’s also the cost to support. When we compare that to the cost of refreshing the data centre assets, there’s a significant saving.”
It’s still early days, but the transformation has already bore substantial fruit for Jemena – and particularly its customers. Capraro says customers can now "spend less time on the phone" thanks to self-serve options. Users are empowered to manage enquiries, claims and disconnections themselves.
Cory Wilson’s 4 action points for a smooth digital transformation
"Partnering with Jemena was a natural fit given what’s come before. Deloitte has a longstanding partnership with Jemena, having worked with them for nearly a decade. We really understood their culture and the challenges associated with running a power and gas business. This allowed us to identify some of the key risks to make sure applications weren’t disrupted during the migration."
- Roger Jeffrey, Partner, Consulting at Deloitte Australia
Opens in new window