IoT and data platform for smart energy metering

Data management is no small feat when almost four million electricity meters in Finland, Sweden and Norway are sending data several times an hour. Aidon is the Nordics' market leader in smart grid metering technology and the provision of related services. Its customers are electricity distribution companies.

"Our meters can collect information on electricity consumption behaviour and predict, for example, when and where consumption spikes or demand responses will occur." — Pasi Jakonen, Project Manager at Aidon

The power grid is becoming increasingly bidirectional, which means consumers also produce electricity. Aidon's meters can measure that production and enable remote connect and disconnect operations.

Refining and converting collected data into business values is at the core of Aidon's business operations. The company makes wide use of Microsoft software and technologies and has developed a new "Metering as a Service" (MaaS) concept, which has led to having to build some services in the cloud. Aidon began building the Azure cloud environment itself and in collaboration with different partners. Although Aidon has extensive experience of Microsoft technologies, being one of Microsoft's Gold Partners, Azure technologies still require special skills. After a long search, for this Aidon found help in the form of Mallow.

"Many companies know how to use Azure in Finland, but Mallow's Azure toolkit is extremely comprehensive."

Mallow's recipe

Chief Technology Officer Teemu Tapanila was the first Mallowian to put his head inside the Azure cloud built by Aidon. And how did it look?

"When the cloud is unstable, it's usually due to a combination of factors. In this case too, the issues were both big and small." — Teemu Tapanila

We've worked on many similar projects, so we knew what to fix first and how to avoid common pitfalls.

According to Tapanila, the work can be approached in many ways. Sometimes it takes long, detailed planning, and sometimes we just jump straight in. How familiar customers already are with Azure plays a huge role when defining their mindset and what they want.

"Aidon's message to us was clear: we trust you, get to work." — Teemu Tapanila

We eliminated issues step by step and automated environment-specific systems and settings with DevOps practices. It took time, but the result was a stable and fast foundation for future changes.

Tapanila sees Mallow's substantive and process-related expertise as its strengths, but he also emphasizes communication.

We also made the work highly transparent so the customer could continuously grow its own Azure capability and understand key decisions.

The collaboration born from the meter reading service system has grown so that, in addition to Tapanila, three more Mallowians now work at Aidon, and the role of the Azure cloud environment in Aidon's business is growing from one product to the level of the entire company. Jakonen confirms that Mallow's efforts to stabilize the cloud environment and improve its usability has enabled Aidon's vision to become a concrete strategy and created a business for developing cloud service-based products.

What We Achieved

• Stabilized the Azure environment through phased remediation.
• Automated environment-specific configuration and operations.
• Strengthened Aidon's own Azure know-how during delivery.

"They are an experienced team that knows how to look at things from a wider angle." — Pasi Jakonen