Water Utility Company: Modernizing a Monolithic Web Application to a Cloud-native Platform with Microservices

Water Utility Company:

Modernizing a Monolithic Web Application to a Cloud-native Platform with Microservices

Industry: Energy & Utilities

Delivery Center: Europe

Modernizing a Monolithic Web Application to a Cloud-native Platform with Microservices

Industry: Energy & Utilities

Delivery Center: Europe

Industry Context

The total market size of the UK's water collection, treatment, and distribution sector was £8.1 billion in 2022, indicating a huge potential for innovation and growth. There is a remarkable opportunity for small and agile water suppliers in the UK to transform businesses by providing environmentally friendly, commercial water supply and waste management services.

A technology-based utility company is at the forefront of this transformation. It is actively modernizing its operations to improve efficiency and sustainability while reducing operational costs and increasing profits.

Client Challenge

The water company needed to keep pace with the evolving changes of the digital transformation era. However, modernizing its monolithic web application to a cloud-native platform with microservices proved challenging. Lack of multi-tenancy curtailed scalability and adaptability, which, in turn, negatively impacted user experience and slowed down onboarding.

Modernizing the application by leveraging current technologies and architectures would enhance application performance and address all their existing challenges. Multi-tenancy would help multiple customers share resources rather than provision new infrastructure per customer. Additionally, establishing a release management strategy would enable more frequent updates to the application in an organized manner. These improvements would deliver a more modern, scalable, and user-friendly application.

Approach

Addressing the water utility company's challenges required a strategic and comprehensive approach. Encora’s strategy encompassed everything from initial ideation to deployment and ongoing support.

Consulting Services helped organize the project by shaping the technical design, facilitating technical environments, establishing Agile practices, and implementing a quality management process.
Cloud Architecture & Engineering helped migrate legacy platforms to Azure for enhanced scalability and efficiency.
Platform Engineering Services from our Romanian delivery center were comprehensive and end-to-end.
Data Integration & Security were key considerations during development, and we prioritized third-party system integration, data integrations, and robust data security.
Web & Mobile App Design & Development ensured a modern, user-friendly experience with Encora seamlessly developing web and mobile platforms back-to-back.
Continuous Delivery was made possible by implementing CI/CD pipelines and automating release management. Not only did this help achieve continuous delivery, but it also ensured efficient and rapid updates.
Test Strategy and Planning were designed and implemented from scratch and seamlessly integrated into Agile development.

Results

The application modernization exercise transformed existing processes by addressing the water company’s critical challenges. It significantly improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall platform performance. Moving to a cloud-based microservices platform has increased application performance and responsiveness. By strategically aligning goals and expertise, the company successfully modernized the application, achieving shorter release cycles and enabling swift updates. With five retailers integrated so far, including a quoting API, the platform establishes a base to potentially expand into other utility services such as waste collection.

Encora achieved a remarkable 98% reduction in customer onboarding time and a 38% decrease in support tickets. Integrating multi-tenant scalability allowed the water utility to meet growing demands and resolve performance issues, resulting in a smoother user experience and faster customer onboarding. Overall, the platform's successful implementation has improved the Water Utility's services, delivering efficiency and cost savings.