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 business enterprise in 2015 with Greg Jackson, the company’s CEO.

Octopus has developed a novel cloud-centered client provider platform, Kraken, which it utilizes to satisfy the needs of its one,five hundred,000 clients, and licenses to other energy suppliers.

An engineer by track record, James tells us how cloud technologies has been central to the advancement of Octopus and why he believes in placing the power of the firm’s novel technologies back into the palms of its clients by means of APIs.

Hi James. Give us the minimal-down on Octopus Strength and what you do…

On the facial area of it we’re a new entrant energy supplier, with two essential motorists furnishing great client provider to a sector which has been not especially effective in accomplishing that, and a drive to make a eco-friendly dent in the universe.

We would also classify ourselves as a disruptive technologies firm.

Greg and I occur from a track record of working with technologies to resolve other people’s difficulties, and now we’re accomplishing that in the energy sector, or the “Entech” space if you want to place an acronym on it.

We began out aiming to construct the encounter of clients and the encounter of our help employees around technologies. Because we have intended Kraken with these aims in intellect it offers us a a lot reduce price to provide and a lot higher client gratification ranges than having an SAP or Oracle-form process which has its strengths but isn’t intended for that purpose.

Ok… So are you an energy supplier or a technologies firm initially?

That’s a bit like inquiring which of your young children you like improved. We’re a relatives with the two, and if we weren’t an energy supplier we wouldn’t have the practical palms-on encounter to know what is really essential, and if we weren’t developing our possess technologies we wouldn’t be equipped to do the energy providing portion as effectively.

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We have expended 20 a long time developing big systems, so we have got and I really don’t think it is immodest to say we have got a several ideas of how it really should be accomplished. There is a McKinsey report we like to estimate on why most IT transformation tasks fall short, and it states it is due to the fact the IT section is however performing as purchase takers alternatively than decision makers.

In our firm the IT section are the decision makers: I’m a director, Greg is the CEO and is pretty technically astute – he was writing online video online games when he was a kid. And the broader board and management crew have been very supportive about the option and the worries of developing your possess platform, so we have been equipped to deliver it progressively.

Explain to us why the cloud has constantly been central to your business enterprise. Are there any specific applications which have been helpful?

Employing the cloud has enabled us to produce our platform in a extremely agile and revolutionary way. You listen to about CICD – constant integration, constant deployment – a great deal, but this is a little something we have accomplished considering the fact that day a single each change in the code base can be tracked back and replayed

We utilized Terraform and deployed to the cloud considering the fact that day a single, so each change in our infrastructure is also tracked in code and auditable back to Working day A person who did what,  when and how. And when we deploy, we’re rebuilding infrastructure due to the fact it is all portion of the identical deployment pipeline. We’re at present accomplishing that in between 40 and fifty situations for every day.

We use load balances and also scaling teams so that the availability of means flexes to to satisfy what we require. The regular lifetime of a server is probably it is likely to be measured in minutes, it is fairly transitory in authentic terms.

How does this differentiate you from your opponents?

We were being the moment requested how long it normally takes us to do a run of 10,000 expenses on our platform as opposed to the industry’s classic strategy. Commonly energy suppliers are constrained by their hardware, or by their computer software even if they selected to run that in the cloud, and you get these long processes [to generate expenses].

If we’re accomplishing a run of 10,000 expenses, it results in being 10,000 jobs, and the dilemma then is how speedily do we require to do it? We could spin up 10,000 servers to approach a single just about every, or we could have 10 servers just about every accomplishing one,000. We want the run to be accomplished in an hour so we assign the correct number of servers.

Now a major bill run can comprise one hundred,000 expenses, but it however just normally takes an hour due to the fact that is the time we want it to take. We’re equipped to use the identical code and infrastructure and conduct the task at a diverse scale.

You not long ago became an AWS husband or wife – why did you plump for this platform about other individuals?

We have constantly utilized AWS and I think the most current evolution is that we have got off the fence a tiny bit. Theoretically we could take our application and port it to Google Cloud or Azure, but when you’ve got a big volume of knowledge set up and you commence to use the value-adding applications around factors like protection that AWS features, there’s a significant upside in investing as a husband or wife alternatively than just dipping your toe in the h2o. We also know they’ve got world knowledge centres and can aid us extend our reach internationally.

You have created a great deal of APIs available – how do these aid your business enterprise?

There was never ever a dialogue around no matter whether we would provide APIs to aid clients obtain their knowledge. At the time we believed people could want to do factors like writing a Home windows Mobile app we did not make an app ourselves due to the fact it was not a market place we observed a lot upcoming in, but we figured if you give people the knowledge they could do it themselves.

Fast ahead six a long time and APIs are supporting us with our objectives of furnishing clear pricing and sustainable energy. When we released Agile [a products which tracks energy provide each 50 % an hour to allow for clients to reduce their expenses by syncing their situations of higher use to situations of higher network capability] we created an API available straight away, and within just a few of months of the products hitting the market place we held a hack day the place about thirty businesses turned up with ideas, a number of of which are now in the market place.

The APIs give an eco-process the place other businesses can aid resolve the obstacle of generating our knowledge quick to obtain for clients. We have the geeks who will generate code on a Raspberry Pi and do incredible tasks, but we also have fellas developing apps for phones and watches so that details is available to clients all the time.

This is an industry which is [in any other case] however working with systems and processes which were being devised in the eighties at the time of the market place deregulation. The latest pace of change implies even a rather smaller alteration will get built up into a long multi-million pound challenge, but we require to be generating a product affect on weather change this ten years. So technologies needs to permit change, and APIs will be an interface that will be a major portion of that.

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