“We worked with Ballard on a new customer portal for over 12 months. We don’t have the most straightforward of architectures but they managed to work with us to produce a good product. Their project management was second to none and they were willing to negotiate to meet our budgets.”
Information Technology Service Delivery Manager, Good Energy
Good Energy Group is a British energy company based in Wiltshire that generates and purchases renewable electricity. This green energy is supplied to homes and businesses throughout the UK. Its purpose is to help homes and businesses be part of a sustainable solution to climate change.
Situation
Ballard Chalmers was brought in for the implementation of a web-based Business Portal for Good Energy. This portal would allow Business Customers to gain access to their accounts and to self-manage those accounts. The portal exposes a collection of business applications, each of which will apply to a subset of the business customers. The main goal of the platform is to show businesses how the energy generated by local generators is supplied to them throughout the day.
A legacy application called Selectricity existed that allowed consumers to match their energy usage against energy generators, using data provided by both the consumers and generators. A new application to replace it was required because the previous version of this application was a third-party system that was no longer suitable for use and so Good Energy decided to replace it with a custom system of their own.
The new Selectricity application would be the first Application being deployed within the business portal to serve Good Energy’s Business customers.
With the view to upgrade the technology, the new application would be developed for deployment on Azure using serverless technologies. The deployment would be designed and developed by Ballard Chalmers and supported in-house by the Good Energy team.
Solution
The application has been delivered on Azure using Platform as a Service resources. All static content including the webpages and JavaScript are deployed to an Azure Web Application. The web application is deployed as a Web site on Azure App Services so that it can be scaled.
The application has been developed using the React JavaScript framework as a single-page application (SPA) together with a Content Management System (CMS) & Victory Charts. The CMS controls page style and content and JavaScript components are used for dynamic elements. Usage of an SPA allows the server to load the different areas of the application without completely reloading the page, improving the user experience. Authentication is provided by an authentication provider delivered by Good Energy.
The JavaScript in the Web Application client controls the presentation of the data and the services tier in .NET Core Web API (deployed to Azure App Services) does the heavy number crunching. These are serverless and scale to the amount of usage required, removing any scalability concerns for the system.
Selectricity
Selectricity is built within a framework which will eventually incorporate a larger number of services for Half-Hourly business customers. The main dashboard page provides the framework for all other pages and based on the security claims held by the user will present access to one or more subsystems. Selectricity is therefore utilising Good Energy’s enterprise log-in solution which will provide the user with claims that grant aspects to different functionality within this wider business portal.
Outcome
The resulting system provides the framework for Good Energy to host a number of services for Half-Hourly business customers, and the fully implemented Selectricity service for customers to be able to see and control exactly which suppliers their energy is coming from. For more information see:
The Selectricity Pilot | Good Energy
From the client
“We worked with Ballard on a new customer portal for over 12 months. We don’t have the most straightforward of architectures but they managed to work with us to produce a good product. Their project management was second to none and they were willing to negotiate to meet our budgets.” – Information Technology Service Delivery Manager, Good Energy