VINCI Energies: The scalable benefits of running native applications in the cloud

“In open source, the best idea wins, and that’s what drives us to collaborate better as a team and be honest about what we can achieve.” Jan Govert Kemps, IT Director at VINCI Energies in the Netherlands, is talking about the global collaborative culture within his network organization, and how implementing a new open-source platform is helping them deliver localized digital transformations for business units across the country.

“We operate as a decentralized organization that allows our business units a degree of autonomy,” he says. “The business unit managers are then able to focus on specific customer needs and find the best ways to deliver services, applications and solutions to a local market.

“This model creates a variety of different software solutions, many of which need to connect with our enterprise service bus and central ERP system,” adds Kemps. “But as we acquired more businesses, our current infrastructure became less sustainable and urgently needed a more flexible solution that could grow with our data needs.

“So we turned to our data integration partner, Axians, who advised us to migrate to a new open-source platform—Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a platform as a service (PaaS) managed through Azure and supported by both Microsoft and Red Hat.”

Supporting a decentralized organization

Part of the VINCI Group, VINCI Energies focuses on connections, performance, energy efficiency, and data to fast-track the rollout of new technologies, as well as support digital transformation and energy transition.

This multi-local business model requires VINCI Energies to work closely with customers to help provide the best value, which it does by splitting its resources into 1,800 business units across 55 countries and promoting an open culture where all knowledge, expertise, and ideas can be shared to help benefit everyone.

“Every business unit works in its own way, but at the same time we're also a network organization,” explains Kemps. “Our business units are strengthened by each other's help and integration, and in many ways, Microsoft has always been a good fit. Tools like SharePoint make it easier to share ideas between countries, and we were early adopters of Microsoft Teams too, which really helped enhance collaboration between business units and within our network.”

“Trust, empowerment, solidarity, entrepreneurship and responsibility are the core values of VINCI Energies, which form part of our open culture,” says Jos Groen, Business Unit Manager at Axians. “If we can’t build the solution we want with our business unit, we bring another in and take advantage of their expertise—that's the best way forward to build a sustainable partnership.”

VINCI Energies has continued to grow over the years by acquiring local companies and bringing their systems and expertise into its global network. This approach often creates a number of infrastructure challenges when a new application or interface doesn’t integrate fully with the organizational systems. But this was something VINCI Energies in the Netherlands was looking to solve with an open-source solution.

“We have a central ERP system that consolidates financial data, goods transfer, purchase orders, time registration, and many other data sources from our business units and their local systems,” says Kemps. “A range of software platforms feed into this, and if a newly acquired business solution doesn’t harmonize with our system, we need to quickly build interfaces to get the data flowing into our centralized ERP.

“All this was hosted on a private cloud as part of our multi-cloud strategy, and we knew that if we wanted to sustain this growth, we urgently needed a more scalable and flexible solution than our current enterprise service bus (ESB) system.

“That’s when Axians recommended us to move to an open-source container platform—Azure Red Hat OpenShift.”

Moving to a container platform in the cloud

“Axians is the VINCI Energies brand dedicated to information and communications technology, and a key focus for us is helping unlock data so that it’s available for business units to use,” says Groen. 

“But to do that, you need the right cloud technology for data integration—and when we saw OpenShift coming, it became clear that technology was Microsoft and Red Hat.”

Axians had previously seen value in Red Hat software when they added a number of monitoring, security and logging services to VINCI Energies in the Netherlands’ previous ESB solution, based on Red Hat Fuse, in 2018. But as the network organization started to acquire businesses at a higher pace, Axians began looking to container platforms to help migrate workloads to a more cloud-based solution.

“When Azure Red Hat OpenShift went live in 2019, we started to notice Azure as a cloud-first strategy for customer data and knew it was a solution that could help meet our business objectives,” he explains.

“More emphasis on security and rapid deployment meant we needed to combine those two things, and that’s what OpenShift and Azure does—give you a container platform in the cloud, without the normal installations and management you have with infrastructure.”

As a new integrated platform, Axians needed to build its solution around the 65 business units within VINCI Energies in the Netherlands, with room to scale up to include any new data sources from new businesses. With the release of OpenShift 4, Axians started migrating the old ESB to Azure Red Hat OpenShift—having everything up and running in a couple of hours and ready to start deploying solutions within the first day.

“Six days later, we were doing the first solution tests, so it all went really quickly,” says Groen. “We had never worked so intensely with Microsoft on an infrastructure project on Azure, but when you work with new technologies, you need to build that kind of close partnership.

He adds, “It helped us easily navigate any deployment or migration issues and reach production in under a week, so we’re all very excited and delighted that we’ve been able to do this.”

Benefiting from scalability and flexibility

With Azure Red Hat OpenShift now fully operational, VINCI Energies in the Netherlands has a powerful container platform to run interfaces independently in the cloud and flexibly scale containers up and down to suit its data needs, without spending time managing its underlying infrastructure.

“It’s a big advantage of moving to a platform as a service,” says Kemps. “Now it’s much less effort to manage multiple software layers and suppliers in our cloud environment, which means we can spend more time on our business objectives instead of IT and focus on improving other services.”

VINCI Energies in the Netherlands has already started to see a number of benefits with the new system, including a clearer view of all operational data coming into the company’s ERP system—giving management a better idea of all ongoing business processes and helping streamline important functions such as invoicing and integrating new business datasets.

“Any new interfaces can now easily be deployed in a container and run separately from the rest of the system, without any interference,” explains Kemps. “It’s a really useful part of our model, and as this data flow increases, the containers we’ve built can scale too—so there’s a real benefit there as our company continues to grow.”

For developers too, having a faster platform to deploy solutions is changing the way they work day to day, which Groen sees as a great benefit for everyone. “The new technologies are igniting passion for these guys and helping them add more value when building the best solution for a customer,” he says.

“It’s quite a specific type of work that’s more than just ticking a few boxes. You have to look at all sides to make sure the code is ready for the infrastructure side of Azure as well as the OpenShift containers, which is very high-level thinking. But the developers are having great fun doing it.”

“We also have ongoing support from both Microsoft and Red Hat, which gives us reassurance moving forward,” observes Groen. “Knowing both companies are involved makes it a very powerful and sustainable solution, and you feel the commitment from these world-class technology leaders.”

Sharing resources with a global network

As VINCI Energies in the Netherlands and Axians continue to optimize their Azure Red Hat OpenShift transformation, plans are underway to share their solution with the rest of the global network to help their counterparts overcome their own data integration challenges.

“We have 65 business units within VINCI Energies in the Netherlands, but worldwide, VINCI Energies has about 1,800,” says Kemps. “Everything interfaces with one central ERP system, which brings up similar challenges to what we’ve faced around scalability and data integration.

“Now we’ve found a solution, we can positively share our experience internationally with the local teams and help them add more value to their customers.”

“It’s a decentralized company, so every country will have to decide for themselves whether to choose our solution,” adds Groen. “We have this Azure Red Hat OpenShift model and strategy now, which is a huge opportunity for my colleagues in other business units to adopt these technologies and benefit in their own way.”