Tenaga Nasional Berhad fuels innovation and agility with API-first strategy

Client Challenge: As part of its 10-year transformation roadmap, TNB wanted to future-proof its technological landscape in order to better prime the company with the agility to pivot and drive innovation and growth at scale

Solution: Working with Capgemini and Google Cloud, TNB designed an API-first blueprint that laid a strong foundation to build, deploy, and scale APIs and introduced new agile ways of working to sustain and accelerate its digital maturity from within

Benefits:

• More agile and scalable architecture
• Seamless integration of applications and exchange of data
• Deeper insights enabled by better use of data
• Improved customer experience through on-boarding new business partners from external ecosystem
• New revenue streams from API monetization

More than just a kilowatt-per-hour business

The energy industry today is disrupted by technological, regulatory, and competitive forces. To thrive and seize new opportunities amid this changing landscape, utility companies across the globe are reinventing the way they operate, as well as building new roadmaps for future growth.

One such company is Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), which serves over nine million customers nationwide as the largest electricity utility company in Malaysia. The 70-year-old organization had previously embarked on a lofty transformation journey to achieve its strategic ambition of becoming the leading provider of sustainable energy solutions, both in Malaysia and internationally, by 2025. In order to achieve that vision, TNB looked into its opportunities to future-proof its technological landscape.

Among the key areas that needed refinement, TNB identified that its existing API products could become more flexible and required an update to cater to new integration technology such as microservices. The company wanted to better align the governance and adoption of API management, as well as expand the in-house capabilities it could provide to support the company’s anticipated growth. In addition, TNB was also keen to explore non-regulatory revenue, whereby data generated from its business could be repackaged and monetized in the market.

With clear objectives laid out, TNB chose Capgemini and Google Cloud as its strategic partners to rollout an enterprise-wide API adoption program as Capgemini demonstrated an extensive comprehension of the company’s digital vision and offered a robust set of end-to-end services for API strategy and delivery.

Laying the foundation for an agile organization

To ensure that the solutions developed were best tailored to TNB’s business needs and maturity, the partners conducted various assessments, as well as virtual discovery workshops using design-thinking principles. A comprehensive program was launched to implement an API Management tool on a hybrid platform with Apigee Edge Cloud SaaS and On-Premises Microgateway.

This established a foundation for an agile, flexible infrastructure, which has allowed TNB to unlock newly consolidated data and services, opening them for broader consumption by internal and external customers, as well as allowing reusability, enhancing security, and strengthening governance requirements. APIs were also developed for the chatbot integration on the myTNB mobile app, and a chatbot was integrated into TNB’s website.

TNB has grown from strength to strength to become a utility that is responsive to the needs of our stakeholders and the marketplace, and we are constantly looking into opportunities to unlock new growth. TNB is now able to capitalize the power of APIs to navigate sustaining and disruptive innovation within and outside our ecosystems, with a more resilient and scalable technological infrastructure, with Capgemini and Google Cloud’s participation in our transformation journey.

– Datuk Fazil bin Ibrahim, Chief Information officer of TNB