The Challenge
A leading energy provider faced a strategic challenge: more and more customers were becoming prosumers with their own solar and wind installations, needing less grid power and able to switch to competitors more easily. At the same time, these prosumers faced complex optimization decisions — when should self-generated energy be stored, consumed, or fed back into the grid? The goal: transform from a mere energy supplier into an indispensable technology partner.
Our Approach
We designed and developed an intelligent energy management platform combining hardware, software, and cloud services. A compact edge device installed in the household’s meter cabinet communicates with the cloud backend — both based on a modular OSGi architecture that enables live updates without device restarts and manufacturer-independent device integration.
Architecture Highlights
- Unified Tech Stack: Identical OSGi runtime on edge device and cloud backend — simplifies development, testing, and enables moving components between platforms
- Modular Bundle Architecture: Dynamic installation, start, stop, and removal of software modules at runtime without device restart
- Manufacturer-Independent Device Adapters: Integration of any energy producer or consumer via standardized and proprietary protocols
- Edge Computing: Performant optimization on embedded hardware (ARM9, 128 MB RAM) with Java SE Embedded and customized Linux
- White-Label Capability: Contract-specific feature sets and customizable user interfaces via hot deploy — without restart
Key Features
- Intelligent optimization of self-consumption based on weather data and consumption forecasts
- Campaign-driven over-the-air updates for the entire device fleet
- Multi-tenant administration portal with comprehensive permission management
- Local and remote access to the device via web interface and mobile app
- Virtual device simulations for testing, training, and demos
- Automatic device discovery on local network via mDNS
Results
- 9 OEM partners successfully integrated via the white-label platform
- Expansion to 3 countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
- Successful OSGi implementation on resource-constrained embedded hardware (128 MB RAM)
- Complete concept-to-market-launch ownership over 6 years
- Modular architecture enabled the customer to pivot business models multiple times without rebuilding
- Successful enablement and handover — the customer’s team was able to independently maintain and evolve the solution