Vapo.

Application management services (AMS) for Vapo’s digital services to continuously update and evolve cloud native workloads.

The Challenge.

Vapo’s history extends from 1940 to this day. It has always been a story about wood, peat and heat. Today, Vapo is the leading bioenergy developer in both Finland and the Baltic states and the leading peat industry company in the whole world. With a turnover of 400 million euros and an output of over 15 TW/h, Vapo has long been one of the cornerstones of the Finnish energy landscape and a major employer with regional offices all around the country.

Vapo had developed an extensive portfolio of digital applications and solutions for their clients and suppliers. As the applications were being moved from development to maintenance, they invited tenders for the most convenient and affordable deal on long term product maintenance and incident management.

In the end, the tender from Nordcloud won because of Nordcloud’s well-structured and documented service offering and the ability to integrate into Vapo’s organization. This was coupled with the faculty’s competence and the ability to handle the whole design from building infrastructure to project finish.

The Solution.

As per deal, Nordcloud provides Vapo with application management services (AMS) for their digital services and have been doing so since March 2018. Application maintenance services help clients to continuously update and evolve cloud native workloads. With monthly budgets for developer resources we’re keeping everything up-to-date and secure.

Probably the biggest challenge was the onboarding. Taking over the responsibility of a service from another team is never a straightforward task. Following standard onboarding procedures the handover of the whole application portfolio from original developers to Nordcloud would have taken over four months. However, Vapo wanted to move faster. Eventually the time was cut down to just one month by onboarding applications in parallel. This required careful coordination and intensive workshop sessions between the original development team and the Nordcloud application management team. Nordcloud were successful in demonstrating their capability to develop and deploy service changes. The team were able to obtain knowledge of business processes, stakeholders and the primary functions related to the services, meaning that all goals were met.

The Reslts.

Since the digital services are fresh out of development there is no data to compare the results against. Nordcloud provide ongoing developer support for cloud native applications – our developers work to fix bugs, optimize performance, build user stories from the backlog, and integrate new cloud features as they are released. Vapo is using this opportunity to develop and experiment with metrics for measuring the efficiency and success of their digital services. That said, the services have been well-received by the clients and at the time of writing there hasn’t been any major interruptions or critical bugs. With something that is expected run smoothly 24/7, no news is usually good news.

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Ilja Summala
Ilja Summala LinkedIn
CTO
Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.