We recently sat down with Damien Tampé, who joined Energy One as the Global Chief Technology Officer in April (2024).
Damien brings more than 25 years of experience, having come from CTO and CIO roles at start-ups, scale-ups and multinationals. During his career, he has worked across many different industries including car rental, retail and quality control services.
In this blog, Damien shares his vision on how he and his team work to keep Energy One’s solutions at the cutting edge, to arm our customers so they can thrive in a changing energy market.
According to Damien, these are the main drivers that made him join Energy One:
- Smart people with huge business expertise, and smart solutions with great traction
- The energy market is going through a big transition, where a lot is unknown and has to be invented
- An international organisation is needed to make the most out of this international market
- Many technology opportunities – like data and AI – to create a lot of value for the clients
An industry in flux creates new challenges
Damien’s technology vision starts from the current state of the energy industry and looks ahead at where it is going. A first trend is that market volatility has been very high recently, and is probably going to stay high for a while.
On the one hand, this creates opportunities for energy traders, and on the other hand, this creates uncertainty for energy suppliers and other market participants. To navigate through volatility – either to make profit or to manage risk – all energy market participants need robust and efficient tools.
A second trend is that there are more actors in the energy market than ever before, which creates a very diverse landscape of market participants, each with their own specific needs.
Last but not least, there are new technologies such as batteries (and in the future) hydrogen, which create a need for new types of software to manage physical and financial trading, nominations and scheduling operations, and risk.
Key market needs
New customer behaviours are forming because of the changing energy market, which create new needs for our clients. These are some of the key trends that came up during recent conversations with customers, industry experts and colleagues:
1) A preference for integrated software
Clients prefer to work with suppliers that offer multiple solutions and services for different needs. However, these solutions need to have some form of integration. Energy One is positioned well with its one-stop-shop approach.
2) Acceptance of the SaaS-model
There is a growing preference for Software-as-a-Service models, since many companies have seen the benefits first-hand. For example, improvements suggested by one client are rolled out to all software users. Another benefit is the regularity and speed of releases with new market connections, new features and improvements.
3) State of the art data-pipelines
The market expectation is to have state of the art data pipelines, and there has been a lot of evolution in the data field this past decade. Nevertheless, there is a lot of unused data that could be used to empower energy market participants with more accurate insights to make better decisions.
4) How to use AI to create value?
While AI is a very hot topic, there is still a lot of uncertainty in the energy industry on how to fully unlock the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Damien sees two quick wins where AI can make an impact:
- Using AI for better operational efficiency
Complex systems, where we have several energy types across many markets, need global optimisation. This can be done faster and easier with the help of AI. - Leveraging AI to make sense of data
Energy market data could be put to use with the help of AI for automation purposes, to create better forecasts, or to identify specific signals that can drive good business decisions.
Why is Energy One well placed to help out?
As our new Group CTO, Damien has spent time visiting our global offices and he has identified several strengths. Damien will use these strengths as the foundation to ensure Energy One stays in a good position to address current and new market needs with innovative software and services.
1. Our global teams
The energy market is a 24/7 market, which brings its own types of challenges. Luckily, Energy One is uniquely positioned with tech teams based in 7 offices across Australia, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Each of these teams has their own experience in different markets.
Damien explains: “We want to forge a global tech organisation that combines the strengths of all of these different cultures, levels of IT Maturity and technological expertise. It’s a unique opportunity for us to have these teams collaborate, so they can share their experience and best practices.”
This will result in several benefits:
- Increase the speed of our tech teams
- By sharing insights from different markets, Energy One can be ahead of emerging market needs
- The tech team can grow on many levels, thanks to collaborating with colleagues across the globe
Last but not least, our global footprint allows people to move between different teams and across countries, which creates a lot of opportunities for personal and career development. For example, we have already heard great personal stories from people who moved from Belgium to Adelaide, and currently someone from Australia is working from our Paris office for a few months.
2. Our technology
Another reason Energy One is in a good position to help companies with changing needs is our technology. We have a wide portfolio of solutions and services for clients all over Europe and APAC.
When we combine all of our business knowledge and innovative technology, we provide companies with a ‘global answer’ to these market needs, and truly become a one-stop-shop for our clients.
To enable this transition to be a global one-stop-shop, Damien and the technology organisation are focusing on several big projects, most of which are already in full swing:
- Our continued push to the cloud
- Embracing the power of AI
- Improving data handling & visualisation
- Adopting modern API Frameworks
- Getting our ISO27001 certification
Damien says all these tech trends have to be leveraged to deliver value for our customers. The way we go about this is what Damien would call ‘The Energy One way‘ of doing things: a mix of being fast and being cool.
We want to deliver innovative and cool solutions at a fast pace, which is ‘the Energy One way’ of doing things.
Damien Tampé, Global CTO
3. Our agility
Clients who have been with us for a while can confirm that we are working in a very agile way. Our technology teams have been pushing adoption of ‘lean’ and SCRUM methodology for the past years at all levels across the organisation.
The way to go about this is the ‘Aussie way’ according to Damien, which means to nurture a really good team spirit and to work together in a way where everyone grows to form a very mature and elite team.
The end goal is to have a global Tech organisation that works as a team to support our customers. As more Energy One clients adopt several solutions in our portfolio, the Tech organisation has to be fully aligned. The focus is on the customer, every client needs to have a unified tech support approach to make their lives easier.
After working with the teams for half a year, our tech vision is well defined and our global technology structure is already taking shape.
Damien Tampé, Global CTO
Interested in joining Energy One’s Tech team?
Energy One is now firmly in “scale-up territory”, which means we are growing very fast. We do this by hiring people with an agile mindset and by partnering with other very good companies who reinforce our one-stop-shop with complementary solutions or services.
Because of the transformation across the energy sector, we are actively looking for people who want to make an impact. The industry ensures there will be a lot of exciting things to build to address changing energy market needs. We often don’t know what these needs will be at this moment, so for agile people who are eager to learn and go very fast, there will be a lot of things to keep learning every day.
Last but not least, we have smart people who deliver smart software and we are in a leading position in many fields, so this is a unique opportunity for software engineers and IT experts who want to help companies be successful throughout this transition to renewable energy.
Interested in joining the team?
