Imagina Energía Accelerates Development by 10X with a Low-Code Strategy with Mendix on AWS

In October of 2020, Hanwha Energy, a division of the Hanwha Group, launched Imagina Energía in Spain, making it the first 100-percent-solar-energy manufacturer in the country. Imagina Energía aims to revolutionize Spain's energy landscape by investing $432 million in personalized self-consumption solutions and prioritizing economic savings and a seamless digital customer experience. Its unique approach involves offering customers immediate bill discounts and long-term savings without any upfront investment, achieved through joint ownership of photovoltaic installations with the Hanwha Group.

Imagina Energía's primary goal is to develop applications that facilitate sustainable energy adoption throughout Spain. Achieving this goal, however, was challenging because of Imagina Energía's small, in-house development team. Moreover, the energy company faced scalability challenges and prolonged lead times due to the complexities of building upon existing platforms. Javier Pardo, CIO at Imagina Energía, explains, “Our past approach to build everything from scratch required a lot of effort in terms of CapEX and slowed down our development processes significantly. We just couldn’t get to market fast enough.” Because it provides customized solar energy solutions, Imagina Energía also wanted a more iterative approach to development that included rapid prototyping, testing, delivering, and making improvements based on customer data.

Imagina Energía turned to AWS Partner Mendix, a well-known and trusted low-code development platform. Mendix provides customers with a comprehensive and straightforward approach to low-code. Mendix helps make application development and deployment at a rapid pace accessible to and easy for small teams. “We only need to specify certain parameters, like the size of nodes, and then instruct the platform to deploy the application. From there, Mendix handles all the tasks involved in the deployment process, taking us to another level of automation,” says Pardo. With Mendix’s low-code solution in place, Imagina Energía has rapidly developed and deployed three applications, and a fourth is underway.

“When we first saw the platform, we immediately noted how easy and understandable it is —especially for those of us who aren’t programmers or developers,” states Elda Renedo, IT project manager at Imagina Energía. When compared to other options on the market, Pardo noted, “We were pleasantly surprised to discover that with Mendix, users retain control over the application development process.” There’s no loss of visibility on the backend when going from traditional high-code processes to Mendix’s low-code platform.

An added benefit is the smooth integration process made possible through plugins available on the Mendix Marketplace to connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as AWS Lambda for serverless. As such, Imagina Energía can take advantage of key AWS services and solutions, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Glue. Imagina Energía uses Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB for object storage and NoSQL. AWS Glue is used for data integration and Amazon API Gateway for connecting data and applications.

The first application Imagina Energía built with Mendix, “multi-click,” streamlines the process of purchasing fixed-price energy contracts—from negotiation to signing to backend processing—providing a seamless experience for Imagina Energía and its customers. The second application offers customers a digital contracting method through Imagina Energía’s website, replacing the previous phone-based contracting process. Clients can now fill out a form online, receive their energy contract, and sign it immediately. The third application is specifically for internal employees and serves as a back-office tool for managing bureaucracy related to solar projects in Spain. This application helps employees handle various tasks involved in dealing with municipalities, regulators, and government agencies. Since its implementation, employees have reduced the time they spend on these tasks by 50 percent.