Meridian Energy is New Zealand's largest energy gentailer with a strong commitment to sustainability. Their operations span energy generation and retail, with an emphasis on providing innovative, customer-centric retail solutions. As they transition into a digitally-driven business as part of their Next Gen Retail Programme, Meridian Energy aims to leverage technology to enhance efficiency and deliver greater value to their customers.
The Driving Force
Meridian Energy recognised the need for a technology partner to drive its Next Gen Retail program, seeking expertise in architecture, engineering, and alignment to iterative ways of working. A key requirement was to streamline the customer onboarding process with new digital experiences. A component of this transformation was the urgent need to modernise its technological and cloud infrastructure and ways of working to support its innovation efforts. Rather than focusing on overhauling existing systems, Meridian Energy decided to try an unconstrained approach and build modern cloud native solutions from scratch. The legacy systems are monolithic and cumbersome to change, leading to slow release cycles that hindered their ability to quickly respond to market changes and customer needs. Additionally, data silos across different departments made it difficult to gain a unified view of the customer, impacting their ability to personalise services and offers. To remain competitive in a rapidly evolving energy market, Meridian Energy needed to transform its technology landscape. This required the creation of an automated, cloud-native environment that would streamline operations, enhance team autonomy, and enable quicker responses to market needs. ClearPoint’s expertise in designing and building modern, scalable solutions was critical to achieving these goals.
Our Approach
Meridian Energy partnered with ClearPoint to establish the groundwork for their digital evolution. This began with a detailed discovery phase which allowed ClearPoint to gain a deep understanding of Meridian Energy's vision and contribute to the foundational planning of the program. ClearPoint brought strong technical advisory and leadership, making sure that the strategy was effectively translated into actionable technical solutions. The team introduced an approach emphasising the opportunity to design and build modern digital products that aligned with Meridian Energy’s strategy and long-term goals.
Key technical implementations included domain-driven design with event driven architecture, event streaming, and extensive automation using cloud native tools such as Terraform and GitHub Actions. Together, the teams ensured a seamless process of deployments with Kubernetes and Helm, alongside secure data management. The ClearPoint team’s technical skills and approach was instrumental in setting the stage for Meridian Energy’s digital transformation.
Furthermore, the teams prioritised creating an environment beneficial to innovation by instilling best practices in engineering including test automation, infrastructure and environment automation, ensuring consistency across all environments and reducing risk. This methodical approach not only addressed Meridian Energy’s immediate needs but also set a blueprint for future scalability and adaptability.
Our engineering and design expertise has shown how Meridian Energy's goals and priorities can be achieved by starting small with greenfield projects and progressively enhancing them during sprints. This approach has built a strong sense of trust between the ClearPoint team and Meridian Energy, making our collaboration feel seamless and effortless.”
- Jevon Tane, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, ClearPoint
We have really enjoyed working with the ClearPoint team as they really embraced our way of working, rolling their sleeves up and getting stuck into the thick of building innovative solutions with our teams. The ClearPoint team took on whatever challenge we threw at them, from technical delivery to any other grunt work needed to support the evolution of our digital solution.”
- Nicholas Warmke, Head of Energy, Meridian Energy
The Outcome
This partnership continues to deliver significant acceleration to Meridian Energy's ability to innovate. New cloud-native and automated systems allow for faster time-to-market whilst maintaining high quality with new features reducing reliance on manual processes. ClearPoint’s technical leadership ensured creating a culture of autonomy and ownership across teams.
This project demonstrated how modern engineering and structured collaboration can catalyse digital transformation effectively. Meridian Energy is well positioned to accelerate the transition into a digitally-driven business as part of their Next Gen Retail Program.
Ready to transform your legacy systems and embrace an agile, cloud-native future? ClearPoint can help you build a scalable and secure foundation. Start building these foundations and contact us today to discuss your digital transformation journey.
