APIs and Cloud Help Power Innovative Business

“We would also classify ourselves as a disruptive technologies company”

James Eddison is Octopus Strength CTO. He co-launched the small business in 2015 with Greg Jackson, the company’s CEO.

Octopus has developed a novel cloud-dependent client support platform, Kraken, which it employs to fulfill the needs of its one,500,000 clients, and licenses to other energy suppliers.

An engineer by qualifications, James tells us how cloud technologies has been central to the progress of Octopus and why he thinks in placing the energy of the firm’s novel technologies back into the palms of its clients by way of APIs.

Hello James. Give us the low-down on Octopus Strength and what you do…

On the experience of it we’re a new entrant energy provider, with two critical motorists providing fantastic client support to a sector which has been not especially profitable in carrying out that, and a drive to make a inexperienced dent in the universe.

We would also classify ourselves as a disruptive technologies organization.

Greg and I arrive from a qualifications of working with technologies to solve other people’s challenges, and now we’re carrying out that in the energy sector, or the “Entech” area if you want to place an acronym on it.

We commenced out aiming to develop the knowledge of clients and the knowledge of our aid personnel about technologies. Mainly because we’ve developed Kraken with people objectives in intellect it gives us a significantly decreased price tag to serve and significantly increased client gratification ranges than getting an SAP or Oracle-variety program which has its strengths but is not developed for that intent.

Ok… So are you an energy provider or a technologies organization initial?

Which is a little bit like asking which of your youngsters you like better. We’re a family with equally, and if we weren’t an energy provider we would not have the simple palms-on knowledge to know what is really important, and if we weren’t developing our very own technologies we would not be able to do the energy giving component as successfully.

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We have invested 20 yrs creating massive programs, so we’ve bought and I don’t consider it is immodest to say we’ve bought a handful of tips of how it need to be completed. There’s a McKinsey report we like to quotation on why most IT transformation assignments fail, and it suggests it is because the IT department is even now acting as buy takers fairly than final decision makers.

In our organization the IT department are the final decision makers: I’m a director, Greg is the CEO and is pretty technically astute – he was crafting online video games when he was a child. And the broader board and administration crew have been amazingly supportive about the prospect and the issues of creating your very own platform, so we’ve been able to produce it progressively.

Inform us why the cloud has usually been central to your small business. Are there any distinct instruments which have been useful?

Employing the cloud has enabled us to acquire our platform in a really agile and impressive way. You hear about CICD – steady integration, steady deployment – a ton, but this is a thing we’ve completed due to the fact day one particular each individual improve in the code foundation can be tracked back and replayed

We made use of Terraform and deployed to the cloud due to the fact day one particular, so each individual improve in our infrastructure is also tracked in code and auditable back to Working day A single who did what,  when and how. And when we deploy, we’re rebuilding infrastructure because it is all component of the very same deployment pipeline. We’re at the moment carrying out that amongst 40 and fifty instances for every day.

We use load balances and also scaling groups so that the availability of means flexes to to fulfill what we need. The average lifestyle of a server is in all probability it is going to be measured in minutes, it is quite transitory in genuine conditions.

How does this differentiate you from your opponents?

We had been at the time asked how extended it requires us to do a run of 10,000 expenditures on our platform in comparison to the industry’s standard technique. Ordinarily energy providers are constrained by their hardware, or by their application even if they selected to run that in the cloud, and you get these extended procedures [to develop expenditures].

If we’re carrying out a run of 10,000 expenditures, it gets to be 10,000 responsibilities, and the problem then is how quickly do we need to do it? We could spin up 10,000 servers to method one particular every, or we could have 10 servers every carrying out one,000. We want the run to be completed in an hour so we assign the acceptable quantity of servers.

Now a large bill run can comprise a hundred,000 expenditures, but it even now just requires an hour because that’s the time we want it to get. We’re able to use the very same code and infrastructure and carry out the task at a different scale.

You just lately grew to become an AWS associate – why did you plump for this platform about many others?

We have usually made use of AWS and I consider the hottest evolution is that we’ve bought off the fence a little little bit. Theoretically we could get our software and port it to Google Cloud or Azure, but when you have bought a massive quantity of info mounted and you begin to use the worth-including instruments about things like safety that AWS gives, there’s a substantial upside in investing as a associate fairly than just dipping your toe in the h2o. We also know they’ve bought international info centres and can assist us lengthen our achieve internationally.

You have designed a ton of APIs offered – how do these assist your small business?

There was under no circumstances a dialogue about whether we would offer you APIs to assist clients obtain their info. At the time we believed persons may well want to do things like crafting a Windows Mobile app we did not make an app ourselves because it wasn’t a industry we saw significantly foreseeable future in, but we figured if you give persons the info they could do it by themselves.

Fast ahead 6 yrs and APIs are supporting us with our plans of providing clear pricing and sustainable energy. When we launched Agile [a solution which tracks energy provide each individual half an hour to permit clients to decreased their expenditures by syncing their instances of substantial use to instances of substantial community potential] we designed an API offered right away, and within a few of months of the solution hitting the industry we held a hack day where by about 30 companies turned up with tips, quite a few of which are now in the industry.

The APIs give an eco-program where by other companies can assist solve the obstacle of creating our info easy to obtain for clients. We have the geeks who will produce code on a Raspberry Pi and do incredible assignments, but we also have fellas creating applications for telephones and watches so that data is offered to clients all the time.

This is an field which is [normally] even now working with systems and procedures which had been devised in the eighties at the time of the industry deregulation. The recent speed of improve means even a fairly small alteration will get designed up into a extended multi-million pound undertaking, but we need to be creating a product influence on local climate improve this 10 years. So technologies needs to permit improve, and APIs will be an interface that will be a large component of that.

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