How Shell and Raise Green collaborated with IBM Consulting to drive rapid transformation.

Maintaining a focus on innovation is top-of-mind for CTOs, especially while building an agile and customer-first tech ecosystem that delivers business value at a fast pace.

To facilitate transformation and implement new and emerging tech, we advise IT leaders to continually assess systems and evaluate whether they are meeting core business needs. CTOs need to unify disparate environments to ensure scalability for rapid growth while building on legacy tech investments.

In addition, IT executives in the energy sector are usually charged with not only leading their organization’s digital transformation but also with addressing urgent challenges related to sustainability, energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Below, let’s look at how two energy companies—one well-established, and one a startup—are collaborating with IBM® Consulting to open their hybrid cloud environment to drive growth and transform speed into value.

Open innovation, open technologies and open culture in just eight months for Shell plc

Shell plc, headquartered in London, England, is a group of energy and petrochemical companies that uses advanced technologies and takes an innovative approach to help build a sustainable energy future. Shell’s target is to become a net-zero emissions business by 2050. To further this goal, they chose to build a solution for the energy and resources industry that could simultaneously tackle sustainability, digital transformation and business growth.

Today, IT leaders look for a partner that understands their world and helps them successfully implement strategies with cutting-edge technologies into their business. Looking to speed innovation with frictionless, integrated on-premises and multicloud experiences, in 2020, Shell collaborated with IBM Consulting to create OREN, a digital mining optimization platform.

“OREN is an open platform for collaboration with different solutions,” says Grischa Sauerberg, Vice President of Sectorals Decarbonisation & Innovation at Shell. “Providers can bring their digital products and offer those to customers. But even more importantly, it also allows them to work together on end-to-end integrated digital solutions that help mining companies tackle the challenges they have around decarbonization.”

The team chose IBM Cloud® as the cloud service provider and the Red Hat® OpenShift® Platform for its hybrid cloud architecture so that OREN can run on other cloud platforms its customers require.

Shell employees and IBM consultants collaborated using the agile IBM Garage™ Methodology to rapidly co-create (design), co-execute (build) and co-operate (scale) the project. The combined team adopted DevOps principles to speed time to value and kept a steady cadence of agile ceremonies to maintain focus, taking OREN from concept to launch in just eight months.

As IT leaders shift focus from one-off initiatives to an urgent, purpose-driven imperative, they must embrace an open way of working. IBM Consulting is the partner for the new rules of modern business. We believe open ecosystems, open technologies, open innovation and open cultures are the key to creating opportunities and the way forward for modern business.

Raise Green’s 10-week transformation

IT leaders seek to re-envision their IT and integrate existing environments to maximize the business value of all their cloud and infrastructure investments. That was the case for Raise Green—an emerging renewable energy brand—who needed to reduce complexity and costs in their IT investments while boosting tech adoption in all facets of their business.

As a startup in a regulated industry, Raise Green took 10 months to develop its first pilot project—a community solar power venture. To take its concept to the next level, the company chose to work with IBM because of IBM’s reputation as an established and trusted technology and solutions partner with experience in sustainability projects, climate data and the energy sector. Raise Green co-founders Franz Hochstrasser and Matthew Moroney spent a week in London co-creating solutions with teams from IBM iX® and IBM Garage to design a framework for digital transformation.

The solution was the Originator Engine, a digital platform designed to allow a person—regardless of experience or income—to navigate the complexities of solar project development. For example, the Originator Engine, running Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, can help disadvantaged communities profit directly from a clean energy project. Raise Green chose this container platform because of the open-source technology’s flexibility, which will allow the startup to extend its platform into other areas of sustainability, provide customizations and offer access to third parties.

IBM Consulting helps transformation projects succeed with an established method to pilot, accelerate and scale solutions together. With the help of IBM Garage and its end-to-end model to accelerate digital transformation, Raise Green streamlined and simplified the whole process of creating, funding and building a clean energy project from 10 months to an average of 10 weeks.

Transform together with a hybrid cloud open to innovation

In all, CTOs responsible for making hybrid cloud architecture environments that integrate seamlessly are in a pivotal time right now. Scaling to meet demands, managing risk and keeping up with rapidly changing technology are key steps to turn innovative ideas into business value. IBM can help you build and execute a hybrid cloud strategy, with everything from evaluating your current technology environment to partnering with our consulting team to co-create your strategy.

For CTOs who cannot rip and replace what they have but look for ways to enhance the value of existing applications, our breadth and depth of expertise with top-tier partners like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—in addition to our own IBM Cloud, Power, Storage and Z mainframe infrastructure—can help you strategize, migrate, build and manage applications on your platform of choice with speed to value.

Lastly, for IT leaders who want to reduce the cost of maintain their existing infrastructure and create new ones on the cloud, Red Hat OpenShift powers freedom of choice: portability, reliability, resiliency and architectural flexibility on any type of cloud—public, private or on-prem.

Transform your business with IBM Consulting and Red Hat.

Download the full report: Strategic Application Modernization.