Metzum: helping big energy companies improve efficiency with data in Azure

“When our customers come to work in the morning, their billing is done. If it weren’t, their mornings would be – to be straightforward – a complete disaster.”

Sven Naustdal, Sales Manager at Metzum, is talking about the extraordinary impact his company’s flagship product is having on Norway’s energy industry – and the time and cost savings it brings for the companies that use it.

“The energy market is complex, with a lot of regulations that are often changing,” adds Odd Narve Vassbakk, Head of Product and Co-founder of Metzum. “For companies to be able to keep up with those changes and to innovate and remain competitive, they need to be able to take charge of their data – especially when it comes to their billing.”

To tackle this industry-wide challenge, the business created ‘Moment’ – a service allowing power companies to outsource their billing and ratings management. The goal was to help power companies be more efficient and to avoid having to stay abreast of ever-changing regulations.

“So many power companies work on outdated, monolithic legacy systems,” says Thomas Watnedal, CTO at Metzum. “These systems are unable to keep up with regulatory changes and changes in the competitive landscape. This means that companies can’t innovate, expand their market, provide a valuable self-service experience, be flexible, or scale effectively.” 

“Moment helps power companies procure energy more efficiently – but for it to work to its full potential, we had to find a service that provided features matching our own architecture,” says Vassbakk. 

“We wanted to be able to migrate our entire system into the cloud without having to re-architect it. For each of the services that we had in the on-prem system, Azure provided an option that was either on-par or better than the existing system.  

“Together with the fact that we could scale all our resources, that proved that Microsoft Azure was the answer to our needs.”

A start-up company changing the energy industry

Founded in Bergen, Norway in 2020, Metzum is a start-up making big changes for some of the biggest power companies in Norway and Scandinavia. 

Responding to changes in the regulations of how energy is procured, the start-up’s founders identified a gap in the market for a new service that would make life easier for power companies.

“What we saw in the energy industry was hundreds of power companies struggling to keep up with regulatory changes in energy procurement,” says Naustdal. “There was a great need for a company that could provide an efficient rating and billing engine. We wanted to be at the front of that.”

That realization led to the creation of Metzum’s flagship product. “Moment” supports power companies with all processes across the MAFI value chain (measurement, settlement, invoicing, and collection), with modules designed to manage large amounts of customer data in a flexible way. 

The product was an immediate success, and the start-up was soon working with some of the biggest energy companies in Norway.

Soon after its launch, Metzum acquired Besset, a small tech company based in Stockholm. This helped Metzum to expand its range of customers and add a new module to its product. But it also brought fresh new challenges. 

“The new module had some limitations in terms of IT infrastructure,” says Watnedal. “It was too limiting and small-scale to be as efficient as we needed it to be, due to its inflexible and unscalable architecture. 

“This is when we decided to upgrade to a new solution that was more suitable to both our needs and those of our customers.”

Modernizing the data estate for better efficiency

“Back in the early days of Metzum, we were looking for a public cloud offering to support our software and infrastructure,” says Watnedal. “Moment is a software as a service platform, so it needs a scalable, secure, and flexible cloud platform able to handle its size and ambition.”

Metzum looked into Microsoft Azure with the knowledge that many of its potential clients were already using the service, meaning that the company could offer its product to customers with prior knowledge of Microsoft’s reliability.

“In Norway, most utility companies use Microsoft and Azure products,” says Naustdal. “This is part of the reason we selected Azure – so we would be using the same cloud platform that our customers knew and trusted.”

This, combined with the acquisition of Basset, persuaded Metzum to undergo a huge project, which included migrating and modernizing 1.8TB of data in this module from its old Oracle on-prem system to Microsoft Azure SQL Database – all with the goal of causing minimal downtime.

“Moving the acquired system to Azure SQL Database was complex,” says Watnedal. “This system is running constantly, and you can’t make changes while it’s running. It’s not just a flip of the switch, there is a huge mass of data that needs to be transferred.”

Metzum built Moment using Microsoft’s cloud-native technology. Choosing Azure Kubernetes Services as the orchestration platform allowed the company to fulfil all requirements Metzum had in relation to scalability and security. 

Using Event Hubs and other messaging infrastructure, Metzum was then able to build a solution that could handle large volumes of data, react to incoming data and automatically do the work required to rate and invoice. In addition, the organization is using Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Storage accounts for data stores, providing scalable and flexible storage solutions. 

“It was important that the entire system could be set up using ‘infrastructure as code,’” says Watnedal. “Using Azure’s Terraform provider gave us a quick and robust way to manage our infrastructure.”

The modernization process was successfully completed by following the Cloud Adoption Framework Migrate best practice and the start-up now aims to repeat the process with its remaining customer portfolio over the next few years.

Improved efficiency and flexibility through Azure

Following the successful modernization the Moment application and the data estate underneath it, the benefits of the new system quickly became evident, with Metzum now able to manage customer data more efficiently and with increased flexibility.

“With this new, cloud-native application, we are able to make changes in our system without needing downtime,” says Vassbakk. “This means we can update several times each day, provide new functionality, fix bugs, and so on.” 

These new features have great benefits for Metzum’s customers too, with energy companies now using a system that is continuously updated without ever having downtime. 

“We can now roll out changes without needing to go to the customer directly to deliver software,” says Watnedal. “We can deploy it instantaneously through Azure.”

This improved efficiency and flexibility means customers are not only able to access the software more easily, but also have more time to focus on their own business goals and strategies, many of which are targeting the transition to greener energy solutions. 

“The whole value chain in the energy sector is in transition to green energy,” says Watnedal. “Along with that comes the need for energy companies to prioritize their workload – something they can do more easily and efficiently through Moment.”

Foundations for an innovative future

For Metzum, modernizing the application and data estate with cloud has built a solid foundation for a future filled with innovation – for them and their customers.

“At Metzum, we are disrupting a part of the technological landscape that has been static for a very long time,” says Watnedal. “Through our updated cloud-based approach, we are liberating data and providing agility to the energy-sector.”

“But this is just the start,” adds Vassbakk. “With the capabilities of Azure and other Microsoft services, we are hoping to bring new functionalities to our platform going forward. There is a lot we can do with AI and analytics services to extract greater value from the data we have on end user consumption and other metrics, and visualize them using tools like Power BI.

“With Azure as our foundation, these possibilities can become realities.” 

The Azure platform has also provided the company with the infrastructure they need to achieve their ultimate goal: to expand beyond the Nordics.

“We have big ambitions for the future of Metzum,” says Vassbakk. “We want to grow within Scandinavia, within Europe, and eventually, globally. Azure has granted us the scalability we need to achieve that vision.”