Vapo builds up new digital business and better customer experience

Vapo invests in digitalisation in order to enhance its business, further the emergence of a more agile business culture and speed up the creation of new services. The objective is to make Vapo’s operations transparent and to ensure that customers can enjoy the best possible customer experience. 

According to Vapo Group CIO Antti Kleemola, no energy company has yet taken full advantage of the opportunities presented by digitalisation. At Vapo, we want to be at the forefront of this development. As an integral part of our digitalisation strategy, we wanted to ensure that our IT platform will be able to support future services. When selecting a new partner to provide services for the Group, we placed special emphasis on the prospective partner’s own business and digitalisation strategy and the ability to provide qualitative and timing support to our own strategy. The solution best suited to Vapo’s needs was the one offered by Sonera and Cygate, part of the Sonera group, which will be responsible for the management and development of Vapo’s data centre services. Kleemola says Vapo’s choice was made easier by Cygate’s references, competitive service portfolio and the fact that its geographical coverage is a good fit with Vapo’s operations. 

Vapo’s digitalisation is now making good progress on multiple fronts. “Not many people know that Vantaa is home to an operations centre for power and heating centres that is used to run more than ten boiler plants across Finland. Another example is that boiler temperature, fuel consumption and the amount of fuel in a silo can now be displayed in real time on the plant operator’s mobile phone. This is what the Internet of Things is all about. At Vapo, however, the scale of things is often bigger than in conventional IoT solutions, but the basic principle of leveraging digitalisation is the same,” Kleemola explains. 

“Customers will probably be more familiar with digitalisation related to network services for district heating customers, which are now in the pipeline. An open business culture entails providing customers with as much real time information as possible, thereby enabling them to keep tabs on their energy consumption, for example, via their mobile phones. For our part, we need to react promptly to customer feedback. And it is exactly here that we need the agility provided by digitalisation,” Kleemola says. 

Petri Niittymäki, who is in charge of Sonera’s enterprise business, says that cloud services provided from data centres are an integral part of companies’ digitalisation processes. “We are delighted that Vapo selected Cygate as its partner in the creation on new digital business. Sonera wants to be the facilitator of our customers’ digital business.” 

Further information:

Antti Kleemola, CIO, Vapo Oy, tel. +358 50 370 4834
Ahti Martikainen, Director, Communications and Public Affairs, Vapo Oy, tel. +358 40 680 4723
Petri Niittymäki, Head of Business Unit Enterprise, Sonera, tel. +358 40 302 3000, email: firstname.lastname@teliacompany.com