Syneco Provides Energy Sales and Procurement Services Using AWS

A cloud-native energy platform, Synection is currently based on 35 AWS services. Because Syneco can choose from a wide range of on-demand AWS services, the company is able to implement innovations quickly.

Syneco began its transition to the cloud with the launch of Synection to more than 100 of its customers. Synection gave such customers direct access to energy procurement functions at any time. Before switching to AWS, the company communicated with the individual municipal utilities by email, fax, and telephone. As a result, energy trading was slower and more time-consuming.

In order to remain competitive in a challenging market, Syneco has to continuously improve its services. Using AWS, Syneco can develop, test, and deliver new services in a matter of weeks in response to customer requirements and changing market conditions. "Customers regularly come to us with new product requirements," says Dionys Laue-Pohl, co-chief information officer (Co-CIO) at Syneco. “Today, it’s no longer enough to put applications in production after a year or two. With the help of AWS services, we can provide our customers with new and reliable solutions in a much shorter time period and improve those solutions on an iterative basis."

Syneco implemented a reliable DevOps approach that enables automation across the entire development cycle. Syneco’s IT team can use AWS services to set up new environments for new applications in minutes instead of the days or weeks it could take using on-premises applications.

This also means that the IT team spends less time maintaining systems and can focus on innovation. "With AWS, we can focus on the core business rather than the tools we use," says Karoline Stich, co-chief information officer (Co-CIO) at Syneco. “We can now create more value for our business and for our customers’ businesses.”

Since Synection was launched in 2018, Syneco has developed around 20 new applications for municipal utilities, five times more than before. Synection now supports the entire lifecycle of energy industry processes, including the analysis of market trends and provision of current market information, the calculation of offers and generation of contracts, the management and monitoring of portfolios, and the provision of risk management reports. All applications are built on AWS and can be connected to the municipal utilities’ own systems via modern interfaces.

Syneco can now react quickly to the changing regulatory market environment. This reduces the effort required to comply with regulations and minimizes the risk for customers. For example, in 2021 an ordinance was passed that obliges municipal utilities to purchase CO2 certificates for customers based on their energy production. Syneco made a calculation tool available on Synection within 2 weeks. With this tool, Synection users were supported in the implementation of the regulation. “The municipal utilities came to us with a problem,” says Stich. “Due to the flexibility of our platform and the speed of our development process, we were able to solve it for them immediately.”

By using AWS Regions and Availability Zones, customers retain control over where their data is hosted. AWS customers can use AWS services in compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). In addition, AWS’s attestation against Germany’s C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue) allows municipal utilities to understand security controls implemented by AWS and meet the C5 requirements as they move their workloads to the cloud.

Municipal utilities use Synection to handle business-critical tasks. They therefore require reliable and responsive services.

This is a major challenge, as applications can be called up by all users at the same time and on an ad hoc basis. For example, Syneco recorded high activity in the morning for individual applications with live trading data. During these time periods, the applications require up to 100 times more computing power than at other times of the day.

If Synection is slow or fails during a period of high demand, municipal utilities could previously only carry out important energy procurement tasks with a delay. With the assistance of AWS services, Syneco can quickly match IT resources to demand. This means customers see high-performance and stable services in Synection when concluding transactions or carrying out analyses. At the same time, Syneco retains full cost control. "The massive parallelization in the cloud allows us to automatically scale to handle peak loads," says Dominik Haug, senior solution architect at Syneco. "The outages and slowdowns we experienced with the on-premises system are a thing of the past."

Synection also offers a high level of security and protects sensitive data when purchasing energy. Using AWS services, Syneco's platform encrypts data and is protected from threats that could affect its stability.

Municipal utilities are under constant pressure to offer their customers the best energy prices while minimizing procurement risk. Using Synection automates and speeds up essential tasks such as updating the consumption forecast, calculating markups, entering data into portfolios, and calculating the open position. This gives the organization more time to focus on developing its business.

With Synection, utilities can create and edit complex offers within a few minutes. Previously, this process took up to 45 minutes due to manual intermediate steps and the lack of interfaces between different on-premises tools.

Syneco has set itself the goal of becoming a leading provider of SaaS solutions for municipal utilities. To achieve this, the company is continuously developing its solutions in close cooperation with its customers. "In just a few years, we and our team have built a platform for essential energy business processes," says Laue-Pohl. "With AWS, we can continue this dynamic development and support municipal utilities in the implementation of their digitization strategies."