Customer Stories
Sustainable Energy Supplier Maintains Rapid Growth With Green IT
Early provider of sustainable energy in the Dutch market, Greenchoice professionalizes its IT department to deliver continuous value; builds a solid foundation for sustainable future growth
Founded in 2001, Greenchoice, is one of the first providers of sustainable energy on the Dutch market as well as one of its largest. It is also the most preferred energy supplier for expats. Greenchoice only invests in natural energy from local sources and is dedicated to making sustainable choices that positively contribute to the climate, people and nature. In 2017, it won the Sustainable Brand Index Awards in the Netherlands.
Create a stable and solid foundation, fast
What
Automate testing, optimize release management and migrate services to the cloud
How
Bringing Inefficient IT Landscape Up to Speed
Greenchoice's IT department grew rapidly from 7 to 50, stretching both servers and staff. As a company dedicated to sustainability, Greenchoice decided its IT department should be, too. Its ambitions to help customers meant first restructuring what didn't work: a system that lacked underlying architecture and transparency.
As some of the company's essential information was kept safe in the heads of key staff, the company's IT landscape was inefficient and vulnerable—it had to be professionalized.
The company approached Xebia for help creating a streamlined infrastructure, transforming what was once complex and inefficient into something stable, simple and easy to manage.
Substantial Time Savings
As a company, Greenchoice was pioneering but its IT department was struggling to keep pace. The company hired Xebia's expert consultants to help automate testing, optimize release management and migrate its services to the cloud via Azure Pipeline and DevOps. The company also implemented TFS release management, which proved extremely successful, according to IT department teamleader, Alex Janssen: Before, a new release would take two people an entire day to process, but with TFS, workflow averaged one and a half hours for the entire landscape—a massive jump in efficiency.
“What struck us in particular was Xebia's approach to making their knowhow available and accessible. Their consultants constantly pick each other's brains, which means you get to benefit from the best practices of their entire team.”
Alex Janssen
Teamleader of IT Department
Setting Things Up Right
Xebia helped Greenchoice realize its changes by setting up a DTAP (develop, test, accept and production) environment, which is done as a team, all working to solve the puzzle of how to make software efficient, quick, and reliable. This included managing the server infrastructure with Powershell DSC or Desired State Configuration. DSC is highly scalable and can be used to automatically configure multiple computers running identical configurations. In short order, the company realized performance gains as the percentage of bugs was nearly halved. A great improvement with a solid foundation for continuous delivery of end user value for the future, said Janssen.
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