Smarts, experience, and trust. How Fronde is seamlessly managing EMS’s transition to the cloud

EMS helps clients to identify opportunities for leveraging insights and provides market solutions in the New Zealand energy market.

EMS pride themselves on being agile, quickly turning around new business proposals and services in the electricity market. To stay on top of this responsive client service, a modernised IT system through an efficient transition to the AWS Cloud was required.

Who better to support EMS in doing this, than Fronde, a trusted partner with a deep understanding of EMS’s business.

For over 20 years, Fronde has been the primary technology partner of EMS, supporting the business with IT infrastructure management and support services, compliance, Roadmap Governance and security.

The team at Fronde knew that with the right approach, the transition to the Cloud could future-proof EMS’s business, reduce cost, enhance security and give EMS ongoing control.

On taking the brief, the team at Fronde proposed a bespoke solution for EMS to ensure a cost-effective and seamless transition, explains Wendell Holmes, Cloud Service Manager at Fronde.

“There were no issues with the backend database and infrastructure EMS was running on, so we identified that what they needed was a hybrid solution. This allowed the backend database and infrastructure to remain hosted ‘on-prem’ by EMS but other parts of the business could leverage the benefits and technology required for user management and external facing services on our existing platforms.”

Richard Rowell, Manager EMS Delivery at Energy Market Services said this solution was the perfect fit.

“It allowed us to put a “toe in the water” and test the solution and services without going to a full systems migration, which demands a significant investment. AWS offered features such as Cognito that helped us move away from some legacy systems for user management. Not having to maintain and update these old systems delivered efficiency and cost savings.”

The transition to the Cloud empowers EMS to retain control of the operation and maintenance, without needing to consult or rely on outside interventions or technical involvement.

“We no longer have to worry about maintenance so this reduces our overhead, support and operational costs. Our operational staff can now monitor the AWS stack via tools in real time, without deep technical knowledge or having to rely on an external support team,” says Rowell.

Holmes said the success of the transition comes down to a deep understanding of EMS’s business.

“Fronde understood the architecture, the design, the implementation, the risks, and the business governance around whether we made a significant change, what it would do to the business, and what would be the impact to their clients external to EMS.”

EMS can jump into Fronde’s Cloud checker application and see what their running costs are at any time.

“We give that visibility so that EMS can see what their AWS Infrastructure costs are in real time. Quite feasibly those costs will go down because of optimisation, or through the introduction of a micro service. That’s part of the continuous improvement we provide,” adds Holmes.

The success of the hybrid model for the initial EMS applications that have been modernised into Infrastructure as Code in Cloud has given EMS the confidence to step into utilising additional cloud services for migrating new and existing applications into AWS as their preferred cloud platform, a service that Fronde has been engaged to continue to deliver for their organisation.

“We made sure we understood and were supporting EMS, and took their business, their hopes and fears on board as ours. We are guiding them into the future as collaborative partners, with great benefits to the energy market,” says Holmes.

Why Fronde?

Cloud, technology and collaboration are at the core of everything we do. We develop and integrate the latest technology, processes and industry tools to deliver effective and measurable outcomes - for our customers and for ourselves. With 30 years of experience within IT across New Zealand and Australia and a team of 100+ people, we’re here to support you as you transform your business.

We’re outcomes-focused, agile, responsive and provide trusted and insightful results. Every single time. Our philosophy is simple: partner with the world’s best, be fully present, and keep it simple — so you can get to a better future, faster.

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