AGL to stick almost everything in the cloud by 2022

Australian electricity and gas retailer, AGL, plans to move almost all of its computing infrastructure to the public cloud by 2022.

AGL’s executive general manager, future business and technology, Simon Morefield, said that the company would migrate most systems and more than 200 of its applications to Microsoft Azure.

AGL and Microsoft will also build AGL’s Centre of Excellence, using artificial intelligence technologies to improve efficiency and create new products including a virtual power plant.

Moorfield said the move to Azure was consistent with the company’s aspiration of using the trusted public cloud for all applications except those that can’t be hosted there for security or technical reasons such as some of the systems used in power stations.

The move will make AGL the largest energy company and one of the first ASX50 companies with almost all technology applications in the public cloud – including all of those used at its corporate sites, Moorfield said.

“Already, we have nearly 50 per cent of our applications in the Azure cloud, which includes systems that support our human resources functions such as payroll, leave, performance reviews and professional development.”

Under its cloud transformation program, AGL has claimed it will increase the speed by which services are delivered to customers; provide access to advanced IoT and advanced analytics platform services; reduce operational risk; and enable better ways of working through automation.

Moving to the cloud has already allowed more than 4,000 staff to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“More broadly, it underpiunned our $300 million customer experience transformation and our $165 million people, processes and performance transformation projects.

“These programs have allowed us to drive efficiencies, develop more products and improve customer offers, as well as upgrade our enterprise systems and processes and improve our technology performance,” he said.