ENGIE Electrabel sells electricity, natural gas and energy services. They regularly offer homes and businesses new applications and new customized services they can use to manage their energy consumption and environmental impact, while increasing their comfort where possible. The customer is the focal point of ENGIE Electrabel’s activities and innovation. Whether a residential customer, business, SME, major corporation, industrial body or public authority, each of our customers receives support according to their profile and needs. Engie are much more than just a commodity and service provider; they are now the partner of consumers wanting to better manage the challenges posed by the energy transition and to consume energy in a more efficient and intelligent way.

Within ENGIE Electrabel, the SOA team (part of IT for Marketing & Sales) is in charge of all integration work inside Engie Marketing & Sales and with the outside partners. The SOA team uses since more than 10 years the IBM Integration solutions to develop and support its business-critical processes that support the sales and marketing activities of Engie Electrabel in Belgium and the Netherlands. Every customer interaction passes through the gateway, integration bus and/or API manager. IBM MQ is used as the underlying transport layer for all asynchronous and persistent messages. The integration backbone is also used to interact with the central clearing house managed by Atrias. These interactions involve business critical messages relating to changes in energy supply.

Solution

As explained above the IBM integration solution needs to support the business-critical process of Engie Electrabel. These processes support customer management, complaint management, marketing activities, invoicing, interaction with clearing house, etc. All these processes are critical for Engie to sell its goods to its customers. Any downtime has an immediate impact on the financial results of Engie.

Architecture

Several IBM integration components are used at Engie Electrabel. We have deployed IBM DataPower (physical and virtual appliances, on-premise and in Azure), IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ and IBM API Connect. All components are deployed on two IBM PureApp systems located in two different datacenter rooms.

Integration Designers

Integration Designers has a long history of collaborating with Engie Electrabel. Currently we have eight resources (mix of Integration Designers, i8c, FlowFactor and Archers) working on site. Two of our resources are working in the dedicated, on-site, support team covering operations between 7am and 7pm. Outside the business hours we perform on-call support services (24/7).

Our consultants are involved in all work related to the integration platform. We help Engie with the design, architecture, implementation and support of the platform to ensure that the business-critical process run without interruption and adequate performance. We are committed to train our consultants on the latest versions and solutions of IBM to ensure that we can provide the best possible advice. We attend IBM conferences (together with Engie), interact with the IBM labs, participate in enablement calls, complete the available training material, etc.