Revolgy Powers New Customer Identity System for innogy with AWS

Czech energy company innogy completely updated its customer identity and access management system in less than six months with the help of AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Revolgy. Its new serverless solution has significantly reduced operating costs while also offering scalability for future growth. It also allowed innogy to seamlessly migrate customers from the old system to the new.

innogy, a Czech energy company, has changed its online customer identity management, replacing a third-party system with Amazon Cognito. With support from Revolgy, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, it was able to add bespoke branding and migrate customer accounts onto the new platform seamlessly.

innogy needed to build a new customer identity system after it had been divested by parent company RWE. Following RWE’s merger with E.ON, the European Council required RWE to divest certain businesses. That meant innogy needed to quickly set up its own independent systems.

In less than six months, Revolgy and innogy deployed a new customer-facing enterprise identity provider (IdP) system and successfully migrated all customer accounts. innogy, already one of the largest AWS customers in Czechia, chose to work with Revolgy because of its broad experience with AWS.

A key project challenge was to find a system that could cost-effectively manage a relatively small number of customers initially but still be ready to scale as more customers are onboarded over time. In addition to better stability, the serverless solution provided this scalability without infrastructure headaches or incurring significant costs.

A primary attraction of using Amazon Cognito was its availability as a managed service with the associated benefits of flexible pricing. innogy is making a major push to convert existing customers to its new online services.

Out of innogy’s 1.6 million customers, a rapidly growing number use online accounts. So the company needed a system that could easily scale, but would not become very expensive as numbers grew. Amazon Cognito seemed like the perfect solution because it doesn’t carry server expenses and could integrate easily with other AWS services already in use at innogy, such as Amazon API Gateway.

Getting Amazon Cognito to integrate with innogy’s systems took a little work from Revolgy. For example, innogy’s homepage did not fit with Amazon Cognito’s login options, which required customization for innogy’s specific needs. Thanks to Amazon Cognito’s flexible APIs, Revolgy was able to use the AWS Amplify front-end builder hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3) to create the customer interface that innogy wanted.

“With Cognito, it’s possible to achieve results in many different ways,” says Jan Sameš, team leader in the IT department for customer relationship management at innogy. “Choosing the right way was a challenge, but the implementation was successful, mostly thanks to the Revolgy team’s expertise with AWS.”

The second issue to address was how to migrate existing customer accounts across to Amazon Cognito without requiring customers to re-register. With the use of digital accounts already quite limited, and growing adoption an important business goal, the company could not afford to lose any users who might struggle with re-registration.

This “lazy” migration process also proved a challenge because the team could not find a way to do a mass migration of accounts and passwords from the various existing ID systems directly into Amazon Cognito. Instead, they needed to set up an intermediate database to act as a middle-man. Revolgy set up this process to run on a combination of Cognito Migrate, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. Because of the relatively small number of accounts, and the serverless model, this proved very cost-effective. Customers logging in to the system for the first time did not have to do anything different—everything happened behind the scenes.

The actual migration was easy and took about an hour with no issues. The system has run smoothly since launch, with no maintenance or other issues.

The project underpins a key innogy strategy, because it moves more of its customers to online account maintenance and away from paper billing, and makes online its primary customer interaction channel. This brings immediate operational cost savings to the company as well as opening up the possibility of making better use of customer data in future.

innogy hopes this will provide the opportunity for richer customer interactions while also saving it money. In addition to having lower fixed costs, the AWS service charges innogy only for active users. Thanks to the system’s scalability and performance, innogy can now grow its online services without worrying about reliability issues or performance limitations or excessive costs—Sameš described the prices as “very friendly.” He adds: “This was our first experience with serverless and it has extended our knowledge and made us more open to embracing it in other areas—it just works.”

Štěpán Kaiser, sales lead at Revolgy, adds: “The beauty is that, for this whole project, there is not a single server involved. Amazon S3, Lambda—there is nothing to operate or maintain at all.”

Since the initial implementation, Revolgy and innogy have also migrated two other online applications to Amazon Cognito. The firm’s mobile application and its business-to-business portal are both using Cognito-based IdP systems to provide customer access to accounts.

innogy is considering adding other features to its IdP system, such as the ability for customers to log in to the portal using other third-party social accounts like Facebook or Google, depending on customer feedback to the idea.

Revolgy and AWS helped to put innogy in the perfect place to encourage more of its customers to set up and use online accounts. Meanwhile, innogy knows that it can rely on its identity system to be robust and its operations to be maintenance-free, with zero expenditure on servers or databases.