AE Stories

Fires in Australia, floods in Venice, windstorms in Flanders and rising sea levels all over the world: there is no doubt in most people’s minds that the recent natural disasters are not just a random series of events. Yet we still tend to forget that climate change concerns each of us, demanding concrete actions and investments from nations, organizations and citizens alike. The task at hand is definitely not an easy one, but here’s the upside: climate change and the need to lower CO₂-emissions in particular spark entrepreneurship, drive research and innovation, and even create new jobs (albeit it in other domains than the traditional ones). If successfully tapped into, the war on climate change will lead to better and healthier lives for all. But where to start? No worries. We got this!

In 2019, AE joined the IO.Energy Ecosystem, an initiative meant to facilitate new energy services through customer centricity. While most energy players know all too well that putting the customer at the center of the organization and adapting your strategy accordingly is what customer centricity is all about, a lot of them struggle putting the idea into practice. For those organizations, switching to the Maka approach can work wonders.

Major changes are in store for the electricity grid. On the one hand, there is the fast-growing variable production of renewable energy, including solar and wind, to be reckoned with. On the other hand, more and more technical applications (e.g. electric vehicles, heat pumps, …) require a considerable amount of energy and have very specific demand patterns. The consequences of these evolutions are mostly felt in three segments of the electricity market: electricity supply, balance maintenance and network congestion. As the need for flexible means to match supply and demand continues to increase, all eyes are now on innovative initiatives such as the Flux50 ICON project.

In December 2019, Cloudbrew took place in Mechelen (Belgium). Hosted by the AZUG user group and proudly sponsored by AE, Cloudbrew is an annual – and free – two-day cloud conference that focuses on all things Microsoft Azure. This year’s edition saw Koen Verbeeck, one of our very own consultants, take to the stage with a session on ‘Moving Data around in Azure’, in which he explored some of the various methods of moving data from one service to another. Did you miss out on the event? Not to worry. In this blog post, we gladly summarize Koen’s findings for you!

When the AE team flew to Barcelona to attend the Gartner Symposium, we could not help but feel a nerdy giddiness thinking of all the technological marvels, forecasts and hacks the yearly summit would likely have in store for us. Indeed, Gartner did not disappoint.