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Eneco eMobility: From Pioneer to Market Leader

Maarten van der Beek, CTO of Eneco eMobility, reflects on the journey Eneco eMobility has taken together with HSO.

What if your growth ambitions outpace your IT landscape? Eneco eMobility saw major opportunities in the fast-moving EV charging market and went all-in on growth. But growth takes more than ambition and hard work: it also demand a scalable, solid digital foundation. What followed was a far-reaching IT-transformation: from monolithic to modular, and from custom-built to future-ready.

Maarten van der Beek, CTO of Eneco eMobility, reflects on the journey Eneco eMobility has taken together with HSO.

"At the start of eMobility, we opted for a tailormade IT infrastructure. This allowed us to quickly deliver what customers wanted, but over time it also led to a lot of custom development and a drift away from standard processes. Our IT partner helped us grow, but at a certain point, we hit a ceiling. We needed to transition to an enterprise IT platform, with separated functionality and a more scalable, standardized foundation."

Eneco eMobility brought in HSO to guide the transition. "In that initial phase, HSO really took ownership of the program, handling both the architectural design and part of the program management," Maarten recalls.

From Monolithic to Modular

Eneco eMobility’s old system was fully integrated and built as one large monolith. “Our previous system combined the front end, back end, integration layer, and even a calculation engine for all transactions and invoicing. But it included a lot of custom development, led to different ways of working, and simply wasn’t ready for the scale this market demands,” says Maarten.

The solution? Breaking the system into seperate modules. "What we're doing now is essentially splitting up that monolith," Maarten explains. "We now have a Finance & Operations system and a CRM system that covers the entire customer journey. Dynamics is our core, surrounded by a large integration layer that connects our portals and apps on the front end. You're basically pulling apart a tightly fused block of functionality and rebuilding it around a Microsoft Dynamics-based core platform, with specialized modules around it.

The Golden Triangle

One of the biggest challenges during the migration is keeping existing processes running. But there’s a solution for that. “Our answer is what we call the ‘Golden Triangle.’ We’ve built a synchronization between our legacy system, the new system, and an external partner that handles charging transactions for us.” This mechanism keeps the systems connected, allowing for a phased migration.

Toward a connected platform with APIs

The next phase is making APIs available to external parties. “Naturally, the next step is to make that integration layer publicly accessible,” says Maarten. By opening up APIs, external partners like leasing companies and service providers will be able to connect directly to the platform. Leasing companies, for example, can link their own systems to ours. That way, we can offer a fully connected platform.

One Team, One Mission

The collaboration between Eneco eMobility and HSO is built on equality. "We follow a one-team approach. We don’t think in terms of ‘I’m from HSO’ or ‘I work for eMobility.’ We think in teams."

HSO is fully embedded in the organization. "They’re invited to office events, involved in planning, and actively contribute to our roadmaps. HSO brings a lot of experience with enterprise-level Microsoft solutions. You can see that in the quality of their advice, both on the functional and technical side. That’s exactly what you need when transitioning from a 40-person scale-up to the 200-person organization we are today."

What does Maarten value most? The quality. "HSO’s specialists have a certain baseline level, and it’s high. That gives you confidence, because you know the knowledge and experience will always meet our needs at that moment. And sometimes you just need someone highly experienced who can solve a complex problem on their own."

What also helps? Flexibility and speed. "Sometimes unexpected questions come up and you realize, okay, we need someone who really knows this stuff. And preferably, I needed that person yesterday. HSO responds quickly to these kinds of requests, and that makes a big difference."

Future and AI

Now that the foundation is in place, Eneco eMobility is looking ahead. Maarten expects AI to play an increasingly important role in customer care and self-service in the coming years. “That’s the most obvious area,” he says. AI helps accelerate and automate recurring processes, giving customers more control over their own data and services.

The new IT architecture not only offers scalability, it also creates a foundation for innovation with AI. “The move to an enterprise-level platform brings additional benefits. It creates a clear separation between frontend, backend, integration, and data, which means we can not only access source data more effectively for reporting, but also use it as input for AI-driven processes,” Maarten concludes.

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  • Edwin Buscher

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