- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer, and today we're interviewing Nick Andrews,
the CTO at Origin Energy.
Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.
I wanted to begin by asking you
what was it that prompted Origin
to actually look at a cloud journey in the first place?
- Oh, Origin Energy
is the biggest energy provider in Australia.
We've got over 4 million customers.
We provide energy services, generation services.
We also have renewable business,
and we mine and export gas all around the world,
so we're a largest business,
and we're on the Australian Stock Market.
We've grown dramatically.
We're 20 years old.
We grew through lots of acquisitions and lots of growth
the first 15 years of our business,
and what we realized after that time is
we had an IT Department that was built
through growth and acquisition,
and was sort of come together
in a sort of rapid growth environment,
but it wasn't as organized and structured,
and had become quite disconnected from our business.
And what we also found
was that we suddenly reached a situation
in 2015, and again in 2018,
and we were faced with quite significant business pressures,
and in that, there was an immediate need
for the business to respond,
to reduce costs and become more efficient,
and our IT was asked to be part of that,
and what we found is
we just couldn't make the changes necessary,
we couldn't keep pace with our business,
that at the same time,
we had inherited a lot of legacy systems
with a lot of out-of-date technology
that needed improvement and modernizing,
and that was causing a lot of instability
and a lot of problems operationally.
So we had two big problems.
We couldn't meet our cost objectives,
we couldn't give a stable service,
and our relationship with our business colleagues
was just not as it should be,
and it was affecting the way we deliver service
to our customers.
- Well, there are so many great reasons now,
and it sounds like it was just the right time
to make the move to the cloud.
And Nick, Origin has achieved huge cost savings,
as you've mentioned,
and benefits along the way,
and I wanted you to share some of those benefits,
'cause the stats are quite mind-boggling.
- Yeah, they are, and surprising to all of us, actually,
as we did...
We set about this journey in building a strategy
a broader IT strategy,
but the key foundation of that strategy
was what we call Cloud 2022, or 100% in the cloud.
We started that, actually, in 2017, 2018,
and it was on the back of these challenges
that we had as a business,
and it has been a great success,
and we have successfully moved all our workloads
to cloud, now,
we're a 100% cloud business.
It's been a wonderful journey,
a very challenging journey.
I think the benefits have been, as we said,
quite surprising.
First of all, a lot of people talk about cost,
cost has been a huge benefit to us.
We've seen about a 50% cost reduction across our estate
by moving to cloud.
What we also have seen
is what I call the clean-up-the-garage philosophy.
We've seen the opportunity
to actually clean up our application estate
and to get things right during this time,
and we were able to remove almost half our applications
in that time,
which actually has contributed dramatically
to both the savings
and the very impressive operational stability.
We've seen more than a 500% improvement
in operations and stability,
which obviously makes our business really happy,
and makes our customers (chuckles) even happier,
'cause the systems they use every day just work for them.
Complementing that has been a whole lot of other benefits
we probably didn't think were gonna happen.
We've had significant security improvement,
because we didn't have visibility when it was on-premise,
we just didn't have transparency.
Now we've got amazing transparency
across all our applications and systems,
and we know what's going on in real time,
and it allows us to respond,
and we've been really successful in responding,
with greater uplift in security.
Our speed has increased.
It was so slow to provision, compute, storage.
It would take us weeks, months.
Now, everything's measured in hours and minutes.
I can't even remember what it was like,
but it is a big change.
The other ones have been sort of complementary.
We've been able to change our workforce.
Along the journey, we've moved
from a model where everything was centralized in IT
to actually pushing empowerment back
closer to our business colleagues, closer to people
who actually deal with our customers every day.
There's a much greater ability
for them to respond to customer needs
and to respond to business change.
We've seen more technical people
across the whole of our business,
increase, as we've done the cloud journey.
It's also enabled us to have some cultural changes,
like more agile working
and more practices that just move at pace,
which is what we had to do
to compete in the market that we're in.
- Wow, I mean, let me just digest this.
You said 50% cost savings,
500% improvement in operation stability.
Holy moly, when you're talking
you're making me smile,
because I can just see it's so genuine,
and I'm really glad that it was worth it for you guys.
I mean, before this role,
I've been at Amazon a couple of years now,
and I was in a sales role, and we literally were told
to call our customers, and reduce bills,
and help them cut costs,
so I really have seen the other side of that,
and I'm so glad to see a customer reaping the benefits
and being so pleased with the move.
- Yep.
- So I wanna ask you,
what's it actually like to work at Origin
in terms of your culture and people?
'Cause I've heard amazing things about your,
well, sorry, not your industry,
actually, your business,
and I just wanna hear a little bit
around the people and the culture,
and what it's like since you made the jump to the cloud.
- I mean, to be honest with you,
our industry, it's going through a massive transition.
It's a very exciting place, actually,
as we go through the energy transition,
and Origin's really focused on that.
We have got a big journey to focus
to a renewable-orientated business,
and even more customer-orientated, with diverse products,
and Origin, like most businesses,
has gone through a massive cultural journey
to try and be the company where people really wanna work,
and I have enjoyed seeing a dramatic change
in my time at Origin.
We have moved to a business that's so values-driven,
we've got these core values
at the heart of our business,
through our CEO and through their leadership team,
and from those values, all our decisions are made.
That is being a fundamental change,
and it allows us to make great, thoughtful decisions,
it allows us to make timely decisions,
and it makes ones that, actually, sometimes,
that are not always intuitive,
but they hold to a set of principles
that actually keep us consistent.
It's collaborative.
I would say that Origin's not too, big not too small,
I've worked for some very big global organizations,
and people are approachable,
and I think that's what you like.
You feel like you're actually connected
with the purpose of the organization,
and you actually have a voice,
and actually can talk to people who are making decisions,
or you're part of the decision-making process.
I also think there's a greater sense of ownership and pride.
I really feel like we've really changed as an organization,
and we're proud of where we're going.
I think tackling the whole renewable journey
is something that's a socially important area,
and we're obviously leading in that area.
The other area of things cultural, I think,
is we've become a technically innovative business.
Previously, technology was just a useful tool,
when I first arrived,
but now it's become the heart
of us differentiating in our business.
We use it to differentiate
how our customers experience us digitally,
we use it to drive better production,
and the way that we get gas out of the ground
and electricity's produced.
We use it to keep ourselves safe.
So if you love technology,
technology's been embraced,
and with that is the innovation
and a real customer focus.
We've moved to a thing called,
what we call Raving Fans Measure,
so we now measure our customers
on how much they rave about us,
how much they wanna talk about us,
and how much they recommend us,
which is a great change.
So there's a real focus on getting it right
for our customers,
and I love those changes, it's been wonderful.
- Well, it sounds like you've got
a pretty incredible culture,
and I really do genuinely love
that Origin is so customer-focused,
it's very similar to AWS.
And one thing that I really notice about Origin,
working with you guys over the last couple of years, is
when a challenge is faced, you guys, instead of...
You're just innovative, and you embrace it,
and like, sustainability, and cutting costs
with moving to the cloud,
all these things, instead of being barriers,
you've actually embraced them,
and that's pretty cool to see.
And I love that you're saying it's quite a flat organization
'cause that's something that's pretty important
to me, as well.
So Nick, what on earth is next for Origin?
Because you guys have already undergone an all-in migration.
That's huge.
You said you're 100% cloud.
So is there gonna be a focus
on modernization, innovation?
Like, where are you guys heading next?
- Yeah, that's great,
and we asked ourselves this question
about, I don't know, nine months ago, a year,
and said, well, what do we wanna do next?
What's our business need to do.
And there are things
that we just need to just keep doing well,
just don't give anyone an excuse.
You've gotta keep operating better every week, every year,
and operationally, it needs to be stable.
We need to be more secure than we've ever been,
and we need to keep getting faster and more responsive.
So those things are just a given.
I think on top of that is
we have committed as a strategy
to do whole modernization, application modernization.
When we moved our workloads the cloud,
we did not lift and shift.
We didn't do that.
We realized that wasn't gonna be successful,
so we did do a lot of really proactive transformation.
We updated versions,
we improved the technology currency.
We actually put in a lot of automation.
But we realized that that was just our first opportunity,
and we've now started looking at our business,
and said, actually, there's a way
to actually improve our business processes more
with technology,
there's a way to uplift
the way applications can service more effectively
across our whole organization.
There is still modernization, particularly...
Technology doesn't stop.
So we started this journey three or four years ago.
What we put in then, actually, has changed dramatically.
AWS is constantly releasing new products to market,
I struggle to keep up with them most of the time,
and we really wanna take advantage
of those new capabilities coming to market.
The other...
I guess, the other thing, just quickly, is,
we also got obsessed with automation everywhere
and the whole digitization story,
and we're seeing that push even further into our business,
not just in the traditional IT,
but we're a big engineering, mining business,
we're seeing that push now, also,
into our OT, our IoT-type capabilities,
so that actually, in the industrial side of our business,
technology, automation, and cloud capabilities
are starting to have a real impact.
- Origin is so lucky to have you as their CTO.
It's really clear that you love what you do,
you love technology, and you love your job,
so I think it's amazing what you guys have achieved with us,
and thank you so much for choosing AWS
to partner with you guys,
and we just cannot wait to continue the journey.
So if anyone does have any questions for Origin or myself,
please pop them in the comment section below,
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much.