Executive Summary
vNEXT helped South East Water to deliver a secure, scalable, and a world-class IoT platform that reimagined what a water utility can do. The platform enables the organisation to support multiple manufactures of Smart Meters, multiple Telco providers, and a variety of communication protocols. vNEXT helped make South East Water’s digital transformation a great success.
| Industry | Utilities |
| Expertise | Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Streaming, Cloud-Native, Predictive Maintenance |
| Technologies | Azure IoT Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Time Series Insight, Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure Active Directory, Azure Key Vault, and Azure DevOps |
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Scalable to handle the high volumes of data and devices in the SEW rollout. This is expected to be close to 1M devices with thousands of messages per second.
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Secure by design with safety nets in each layer and component of the solution.
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An architecture flexible enough to support multiple Telco providers, multiple communication protocols, and multiple device vendors.
Solution
vNEXT helped SEW to design and deliver their new Digital Utility IoT (DU-IoT) platform within budget and on-time. The delivered solution was innovative and patentable to deliver on SEW’s vision of better customer experience, improved sustainability, and operational efficiency. The solution was built on Azure IoT services including Azure IoT Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, Time Series Insights, and other services. Key activities included:
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Helping SEW envisage the future and worked collaboratively to align the organisation's strategy with the program and the project activities.
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Working closely with SEW's business analysts and other stockholders to define the design specifications and to setup an agile and iterative delivery process that adds values incrementally while reducing risks.
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Working with SEW's internal teams and their partners to deliver a Proof-of-Concept and a Proof-of-Value, serving a critical role in shaping a common understanding of the platform and its capabilities across the company.
Outcome
Within months, the new DU-IoT platform moved from an idea to a Proof-of-Concept to a fully operational platform that is running in production and powering the operations of the organisation. Key deliverables included:
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A secure, scalable, elegant, and patentable new platform to manage SEW's new digital meters. The platform was built on Microsoft Azure and offers features including device management, alarm management, firmware management, and much more.
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The new platform has full integration with enterprise systems for billing, asset management, GIS, telco providers, etc.
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The solution was designed to be scalable and to take advantage of the agility of Microsoft Azure by scaling on demand and in real-time, saving resources and reducing costs.
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A highly flexible and adaptive solution architecture that not only delivers on the requirements but also future proofs the solution. The delivered platform is capable of supporting many Telco providers, smart devices (water meters), manufacturers, and communication protocols. This enables SEW to save on costs by choosing the lower cost providers and taking advantage of the flexibility of the new platform.