Centrica drives innovation with move to Microsoft Azure
Centrica, a company with a history dating back over 200 years, a global presence and which generates around £29 billion in revenue, is one of the world’s leading energy services and solutions provider.
Operating in an intensely competitive industry, Centrica opted to move to the cloud, in order to access the best technology and to harness levels of flexibility and agility that it had never had before.
Migrating their operations to Microsoft Azure has enabled the company to focus more acutely than ever on meeting the ever-evolving needs and demands of their customers.
According to Centrica Group CIO Mike Young: "It's allowing us to concentrate on what future products and services might be for our customers because we've got flexibility and agility that we've never had before."
Centrica’s migration to Microsoft Azure has allowed the company to drive innovation across every aspect of their operations. Daljit Rehal, SVP Digital and Data Systems, states that: "It's the engine by which we drive everything. Tariffs and pricing, our marketing, our insight, our campaign management through to things we're trying to do to improve our customers lives."
Rehal adds that: "We moved 220 applications and 9 petabytes of data into the cloud. We achieved more in a shorter period of time than any infrastructure project that Centrica has done to date".
According to Centrica Vice President for Global Infrastructure and Operations Darren Miles, since moving to Microsoft Azure: “We’re much quicker, faster and more reliable across our systems. These are the tools that underpin our business processes that are used by thousands of people for thousands of transactions every day.”
“That kind of speed is a really key part of giving great service to the customer, but also supporting our internal colleagues in the wider business so they can access the information they need to do their job.”
Summing up Centrica’s experience of migrating to the cloud and what it has brought to their business, CIO Mike Young said: “We've pulled off a minor miracle here, on what I would consider to be one of the biggest cloud moves in the UK. We have built something that allows us to be super competitive. I couldn't have asked for more.”
