The energy and utilities industries are undergoing a dramatic shift driven by rising stakeholder and customer expectations, increasing economic, and political uncertainty, and emerging new technologies.
Stakeholders demand greater transparency into the supply chain to optimize operations and cut costs. Customers demand easier access to their data as well as digital channels to increase engagement with their energy and utilities providers. Geopolitical activity, coupled with changing governmental policy, drives unparalleled industry uncertainty. Moreover, advancements in technology, such as IoT and renewable energy sources, are opening up new business opportunities, while at the same time increasing competition. Business leadership must prepare their organizations to adapt and evolve with the industry.
An API-led approach to energy and utilities integration
To remain competitive and profitable in light of these shifts, energy and utilities firms must transform their operating model, leveraging technology as a change catalyst. Doing so, however, increases demands on IT. In particular, integration has become a bottleneck that slows down digital transformation as it is often delivered in these industries via point-to-point custom code.
MuleSoft’s solution to this bottleneck is API-led connectivity, a new way of thinking about integration. With an API-led approach, organizations can launch and scale IT projects up to four times faster due to the reusability of APIs. Within the energy and utilities industries, this means that IT can rapidly launch projects that improve the customer and stakeholder experience, increase employee productivity, and enable new products and services in response to major industry shifts.
Siemens transforms how the world consumes energy using APIs
Siemens is the largest manufacturing and electronics company in Europe with over 351,000 employees across the world. The company was charged with rolling out 60 million smart meters to accommodate UK climate change regulation; as a result, they needed a more efficient way of managing their complex network of devices, vendors, and suppliers.
With MuleSoft, Siemens leveraged APIs to unlock siloed services and data residing within their legacy IBM mainframes, and to expose this data to their network of service providers. This approach has enabled them to allow mobile and web applications to consume this data — contributing to a superior partner and customer experience — while maintaining the downstream integrity of these systems through throttling and rate limiting API policies. Furthermore, Siemens has been able to repurpose these APIs to expose energy consumption data to regulatory authorities in real-time — eliminating the need to manually prepare and submit reports.
The end result? With MuleSoft, Siemens has increased project delivery speed by 50%. They’ve cut down the amount of time required to deliver new project MVPs in half. And in doing so, they’ve laid a foundation to help the business rapidly innovate and redefine how energy is consumed.
“With MuleSoft, we’re thinking about service-based, API-driven, architecture, allowing us to be more dynamic and have better speed to market.”
-Jeff Heathcote, Head of Technical Delivery, Siemens
For more examples on how industry leaders have effectively implemented an API-led connectivity approach, read our whitepaper, How APIs power digital transformation for energy and utilities.
