Gasum Industry Hack API.

The Client.

Gasum is a Finnish expert in natural energy gases with revenues of over 1B €. Gasum imports, transmits and supplies natural gas and biogas for a broad range of customers in energy production, industry, homes and land and maritime transport.

The Challenge.

Gasum hosted an IndustryHack competition and wanted to offer as much operational data as possible for the contestants. The competing teams would develop their ideas and applications based on the data during a 48-hour weekend.

The goal was to create a unified, reliable and well-documented API, through which contestants could easily access and understand all the available data. Because of the tight schedule, the contestants could not afford to spend hours and hours just learning and configuring technical details.

The Solution.

We started the project by having several expert workshops, where we got to know Gasum’s operational systems and data. The knowledge was collected into a data dictionary, which documented and explained the various technical concepts and terms.

Nordcloud then developed a cloud API platform using Amazon AWS technologies such as Redshift, RDS, API Gateway and Lambda. All the operational data was anonymized, cleansed and imported to the cloud platform. IndustryHack participants were then able to freely but securely access it using API keys during the event.

The Results.

The IndustryHack event was very successful and many innovative new applications were produced during the weekend. We received positive feedback on the API platform. Teams were able to quickly and easily utilize the operational data and develop their ideas based on it.

We believe the same approach of using the cloud to expose operational data in an approachable but secure manner can be applied to a wide array of customer cases. It leads to accelerated innovation and completely new ideas, as the friction of tedious and time consuming backend systems integration is removed.