Energy: Big Data and IoT platform that maps energy expenditure
Energisme has set up a platform for local authorities and manufacturers that maps their energy expenditure. To achieve this, the software provider has assembled state-of-the-art technologies and entrusted their outsourcing to Claranet.
The era of energy savings 3.0 has arrived. Since Thierry Chambon and his associates took the reins in 2015, the energy management software provider, Energisme, has developed a whole new generation of online platform specialising in consumption monitoring.
"Our customers are municipalities, real estate management companies, and manufacturers who need to have a global view of their energy consumption. Thanks to our platform which shows the behaviour of their buildings, they identify the anomalies to be rectified and better anticipate their energy needs in order to purchase it under the best conditions ", explains Thierry Chambon.
In practice, the Energisme solution solves the difficulty of manually comparing the electricity, water or gas readings, on quickly obsolete Excel sheets which may not have been detailed enough or rigorously updated. Here, the online platform is powered by the energy bills that customers pay but also by the information regularly sent to it by connected meters, remote management machines (BMS / GTC) or even exterior and interior thermometers. of the solution for the end-user is a graphical dashboard, designed to aid decision-making.
In addition to indicating where work would be necessary to limit waste, our platform includes a consumption history which gives the measure of energy oversizing. It should be noted that on average energy suppliers calculate a tariff based on an estimate three times too high. In a few months, our platform has thus become critical in reducing bills."
Thierry Chambon
President of Energisme
The challenge: ensuring the platform meets increased demand
Put into production at the end of 2015, the Energisme platform is a meticulous assembly of next-generation technology. A cluster of servers, equipped with high performance nVidia GPU computing cards, analyses the information collected in a Cassandra database through virtual machines. When there are peaks of activity, ElasticSearch search servers are activated. The whole system runs on Azure, from Microsoft data centres located, in this case, in the Paris region and in Marseille.
However, since Energisme's core business consists of developing its platform and developing tailor-made environments, the company has chosen to rely on a third party to ensure the maintenance of IT resources in production on Microsoft's Azure cloud.
Entrust outsourcing to Claranet to commit to a maximum level of service
Among the service providers met, Energisme entrusted the outsourcing of its Azure cloud platform to Claranet. “In an activity as sensitive as ours, it was not a question of working in supplier mode but rather as part of a partnership, hence the choice of Claranet who sent a DevOps team to understand our requirements and our expectations rather than a catalogue of services,” summarises Thierry Chambon.
The mission entrusted to Claranet was threefold. First, we had a preventive role: we analyse the activity on the platform and regularly advise Energisme on the new cogs to be put in place to maintain the availability of applications, whether on Azure, or in the perpetual code, evolution of Energisme applications. In order to resolve any problem as quickly as possible, we also take care of incident management, in coordination with the technical teams of Energisme and Azure. Finally, we help Energisme control their costs for Microsoft Azure resources by providing technical adjustments within the platform to avoid wasting virtual machines that are hosted but not used.
Each month, several terabytes of new readings are added to the data already being processed. Our platform must therefore constantly improve to maintain its level of performance and Claranet supports us on how to improve it properly. Without them, we would not be able to commit to an optimal level of service to our customers, which is a fundamental prerequisite in our activity."
Thierry Chambon
President of Energisme
The president of Energisme has an ambitious roadmap, in particular with the upcoming integration of artificial intelligence and blockchain systems that will further improve users’ energy savings achievable. In addition, the platform can communicate with third-party solutions, such as applications used by landlords, to provide more functions. According to Thierry Chambon, these outsourcing needs are not stopping any time soon.
