A2A: Matching utilities to millions, and minimizing waste
About A2A
Founded in 2007, A2A delivers utilities to more than 2.5 million customers and employs more than 12,000 people.
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Accenture
International consultancy Accenture has won Google Partner Awards eleven times for helping businesses solve challenges with Google Cloud.
Atos
Atos empowers organizations on their digital transformation journey to becoming cloud forward, customer-centric, and future-ready.
Italian utilities provider A2A fluidly scales its business, improves customer service and aims to meet key United Nations’ 2030 sustainability goals, thanks to robust data solutions on Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Scales automatically to match unpredictable data demands from IoT devices
- Updates solution without downtime, using a CI/CD pipeline and microservices
- Ensures operational consistency and improved security across cloud and on-premises servers using Google Cloud Anthos
- Combines SAP and other data sources in BigQuery to empower customer care operators to provide better service
Customer data updates every 5 mins, instead of 24 hours
More than 2.5 million people trust A2A to deliver essential services for everyday life: electricity, gas, clean water, and waste collection. And with so many households on its network, the way the company meets their needs has far-reaching consequences for the natural environment. So when the multi-utility group announced an ambitious ten-year €16 billion investment plan in 2020, it redefined itself in recognition of these responsibilities. Today, A2A aspires to be a ‘life’ company: at once making life possible for its customers, and preserving life in the natural world with commitments to renewable energy and a circular economy.
Digital transformation is central to that vision. Pursuing a data-driven, customer-centric strategy, A2A aims to double its client base by 2030, as the Italian energy market enters a new phase of liberalization. But increasing customer numbers, shifting expectations, and the uptake of new technology, such as smart electricity meters, make it difficult to predict infrastructure requirements. To match its sustainable vision with the realities of the market, A2A chose to ground its growth in highly scalable architecture, supporting everything from analytics to its SAP environment.
"To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A," says Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy. "Google Cloud data infrastructure is the very best available, pulling together the elements we need to build a highly scalable platform that transforms to match our needs."
"To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A. Google Cloud data infrastructure is the very best available, pulling together the elements we need to build a highly scalable platform that transforms to match our needs."
—Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy, A2AReliable data infrastructure for a market in flux
As customer-centric organizations scale up, the challenge of provisioning data infrastructure rapidly becomes more complex. Introducing a new metric may mean increasing capacity by an order of magnitude, while priorities and processes can also change, shifting strategic focus from one data source to another.
Truly robust data architecture adapts to these demands without compromising on speed or availability. And at A2A, speed is essential. "Our data warehouse would refresh every 24 hours, but if we have a customer on the telephone, calling because their power has been cut off due to an unpaid bill, we have to respond right away, to restore power as soon as they pay," says Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C and B2B. With great speed, A2A’s 250 customer care operators can be ready to offer personalized, value-added services and sustainable options tailored to the needs of each customer.
With its previous solution, A2A needed to define the budget for its data warehouse over a two-year timeframe, but the imminent liberalization of the market and the rollout of new technology makes those data requirements hard to predict. "Each new electricity meter can send us data every ten minutes," explains Martino. "Across millions of customers, that’s an extraordinary quantity of data. It won’t stop there, as IoT devices become more normal. And if we can’t be sure of the scale we need to work at, we have to guarantee scalability instead."
To do that, A2A used Google Cloud products to create scalable, responsive customer analytics. Using TIM Group as a Google Cloud enabler, aiming to accelerate the growth path towards sustainable energy transition and digital transformation, and with integration expertise from Accenture, A2A migrated from a monolithic infrastructure to scalable microservices. To help prepare for new challenges arising from the deregulation of the electricity market in Italy, A2A relied on Accenture’s expertise - to implement the new application map and set up Google Cloud-based infrastructure. Atos developed the implementation of "SAP S/4HANA for Utilities" as the new billing vertical system on cloud.
The team uses Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters of instances on Google Compute Engine with Google Cloud Load Balancing and backups on Google Cloud Persistent Disk. A2A deployed SAP S/4HANA and BW/4HANA on Google Cloud infrastructure, with assistance from Qlik in integrating, modelling and reporting SAP data. With customizations built outside the SAP application layer in Google Kubernetes Engine, A2A makes SAP data more widely available, boosting agility and innovation.
With a unified, scalable data lake based on Google BigQuery and Google Cloud SQL, A2A combines everything from SAP transactional data, to data from its CRM, Google Analytics and Google Ads. Using Google Cloud Dataflow for stream processing and Google Cloud Composer to orchestrate data pipelines, A2A consolidates all the information it needs to deliver personalized customer care in near real time using scalable tools. And because A2A operates a mixed architecture with elements on-premises, the team uses Google Cloud Anthos as a managed service to ensure operational consistency across platforms.
"From Google BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it," says Martino. "Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports."
"From Google BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it. Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports."
—Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C & B2B, A2AAlways available, always up-to-date
The new A2A data solution refreshes every five minutes, instead of 24 hours, so A2A can respond to its customers' needs without delays. While with microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, the team can update the solution through continuous integration, eliminating the need to shut down the solution every month to make changes. And, because the solution automatically scales to meet demand, employees and customers alike can trust A2A to deliver what they need, when they need it.
"People often cite ‘technology’ as the solution for problems, like a buzz-word," says Rizzo. "But in the case of sustainability, a data-driven approach really is the best way to minimize waste. Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time."
“People often cite ‘technology’ as the solution for problems, like a buzz-word. But in the case of sustainability, a data-driven approach really is the best way to minimize waste. Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time.”
—Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy, A2ATell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About A2A
Founded in 2007, A2A delivers utilities to more than 2.5 million customers and employs more than 12,000 people.
About partners
Accenture
International consultancy Accenture has won Google Partner Awards eleven times for helping businesses solve challenges with Google Cloud.
Atos
Atos empowers organizations on their digital transformation journey to becoming cloud forward, customer-centric, and future-ready.