SMARD – the electricity market data platform of the German Federal Network Agency – is online since 3 July 2017. The new transparency platform deciphers the German electricity system for all interested citizens. Easily comprehensible graphics visualizes the most important information regarding electricity in Germany – such as planned and actual production from the wind, solar or other sources, wholesale prices or national consumption. Background articles explain effects and correlations in an understandable language.
The platform in detail
SMARD consists of four major areas: Electricity market news, Visualize market data, Overview of Germany, and Electricity market explained.
Electricity market news contains some news stories on selected trends of the German electricity market as a pillar of our supply chain. New articles are added constantly.
In the area Visualize market data, you can graphically plunge into different data categories, such as electricity production and consumption, electricity trading and system stability. One advantage: You are able to open different graphics in parallel in order to better comprehend correlations and to compare numbers. The data you see there comes from the platform of the European grid operators association ENTSO-E. First, they get checked whether they are correct and complete, then treated and conditioned, and finally published on SMARD. This process assures a correct data presentation near real time.
Overview of Germany renders data visible on a map of the German market area. This map allows a geographical overview of the power production landscape: Where are the most power plants, which energy sources dominate in which region? There is also information about the real-time electricity feed-in for power plants with more than 100 Megawatt per generating unit.
Electricity market explained is the contextualizing part of SMARD – and is a unique feature of the platform. Interested citizens can read intelligible background information about the functioning and the technical terms of the electricity market. This editorial accompaniment distinguishes SMARD from most existing pure data platforms.
A log-in area lets you personalize SMARD. Graphics created with SMARD can be stored here; in so doing, users can easily return later and find it again with just some clicks. Same applies to articles from the areas Electricity market news and Electricity market explained.
A platform for the general public – and for experts
Germany’s electricity landscape is in full transformation. This change requires explanation – renewable energies are gaining in importance, networks are being expanded, and power plants are being decommissioned. People keep asking questions. SMARD fills this gap. It is addressed to the general public as well as to energy experts and analysts. People interested in the electricity market can dive deeply into the matter.
The website is developed by the digital experts of EWERK and xitee, two companies with profound knowledge from the energy and data sector. Both are a long-standing IT partners of several exchanges and energy suppliers in Germany and Europe. On behalf of the Federal Network Agency, the teams of both companies are now developing together a digital, interactive world of energy facts with a clear design and smooth data flows. The website will be further developed continuously.
Technologies: Java 1.8, Spring, Hibernate, Vaadin 7, RabbitMQ, Apache POI, TomCat, SQL, PostgreSQL, Power Shell, Windows Server
AOK Sachsen-Anhalt is a German health insurance company based in Magdeburg (with another 44 branches in Saxony-Anhalt). With its 750.000 clients, AOK Sachsen-Anhalt represents the market leader in Saxony-Anhalt.
xitee worked together with HBSN AG on the development of a web-based application “GESUNDESKONTO”. With the “GESUNDESKONTO” the AOK offers its customers a budget for additional services such as professional dental cleaning, osteopathy or travel vaccinations which can be applied for and tracked easily, conveniently and quickly via an online portal. Customers can make a contact via the online office in the “GESUNDESKONTO” and find there the range of services and the corresponding provider. After using the services, the insured persons upload their invoices online. These are prechecked by the application and the customer may receive information about errors or missing information. Afterwards the invoice is automatically forwarded to the AOK inventory system, oscare®, and the insured persons will be reimbursed their expenses after a short time.
In this application, customers of AOK Sachsen-Anhalt can check their bonus-status, upload invoice for reimbursement and find other useful functionality like contact details for all branches (and have a chance to check their details and “favorite” them for their personal dashboard). The goal was to create a customer-oriented, user-friendly service saving customers’ time and therefore creating added value.
AOK GESUNDESKONTO was launched on 01.02.2020 after an intensive marketing campaign in Saxony-Anhalt. The individual programming and technical implementation were carried out by the xitee team with a short development time. A special challenge was to integrate “GESUNDESKONTO” into the AOK Saxony-Anhalt’ system oscare®. We are more than happy that our successful cooperation with AOK Saxony-Anhalt continues further since our team is now co-responsible for the support of the GESUNDESKONTO and is developing another functionality for the application.
Technologies: JAVA 11, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Flyway, MariaDB Galera Cluster, SonarQube, Tomcat, Spring Security, SAML,/OAuth, 2FA , JWT, Ldap, Spring Data Rest, Spring Integration, Angular 8, RxJS, Apache httpd, Docker, CENTOS/RHEL, JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Maven, JUnit, Jasmin, Selenium
The world of IT keeps evolving and continuously brings new innovations. These changes can be both an opportunity as well as a threat. Therefore, having an innovative advisor who can help you plan for the long-term, tailor a strategy that fits, and uncover the right tech for your toughest business problems (no matter the industry), is so crucial.
xitee provides a wide range of services to help your organization’s IT effectiveness. Our expert services include specialized services such as digital transformation, business analysis, UI/UX design, project management and IT technology consulting. In the IT technology consulting, the goal is to find the best technology for our clients which supports them in achieving their business objectives.
These services mentioned above can be very beneficial both to the clients with an already existing solution as well as to the ones who want to create a brand new one. We also offer consulting on new solutions either as a part of a complete development project or also individually as a separate service. Our team consists of IT experts with long-term expertise in the areas of change management, software development and requirements management and IT service providers. We can advise and support our customers during the entire process starting from the analysis through the strategy and concept development all the way to the implementation and deployment to production. If required, we can take on interim management tasks as well.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies in order to create new (or modify existing) business processes and customer experiences to meet changing business and sector requirements.
In xitee, we offer:
solution consulting where we analyze your IT solution and help you to make strategic decisions
digital transformation where we help you with digitalizing of your business. This digital transformation will give the competitive edge to your business
feasibility study where we analyze viability of an idea, such as ensuring whether the project is legally and technically feasible as well as economically profitable
process improvements where we compare your internal IT processes with the best practices used in our company and on the market. The area for process improvements is wide: quality assurance, testing strategy and approach, project management, version control, release management, IT support & maintenance
Business analysis
Business Analysis increases the probability of project success, increases product quality, reduces development costs and enables our experts to optimize customer processes to be suitable for digitalization. The usage of a business analysis comes into consideration especially for larger projects, with many requirements and rather vague scope.
Our business analysts analyze the existing solutions with the intention to either enhance or replace them or define together with the customer the requirements for a brand new one. In order to do this, we can prepare and lead workshops (offline or online) where we go through the existing business processes and define the use cases. This process ensures that no existing key functionality gets forgotten, plus the experience with any existing solution are the basis for new solution enhancements.
Based on our findings, our team prepares, together with you (our customer), the requirement document and specification of the new solution. When needed, we can also help with the definition of acceptance criteria for the new solution to be used during testing.
Typical tasks of xitee include, but are not limited to:
• Analysis of the UI/UX and the database of an existing solution • Analysis & modeling of business processes • Preparation and leading of workshops • Writing and reviewing of use cases • Analysis and writing of requirement and specification documents • Preparation and summarizing of acceptance criteria
Development methodologies
Choosing the right methodology is a key element for the project success and saves costs. Many of our customers have hired us to help them get their projects out of trouble and this is what we are here for.
Our team consists of experts with a long-term expertise in project management. We can advise and support our customers during the entire process starting from the analysis through the strategy and concept development all the way to the implementation and deployment to production.
When approaching our projects, we usually use agile methodologies for their management. In some cases, classical linear models, such as Waterfall, are also used. The choice of the project management methodology is based on the concrete project, its specifics, and requirements.
The classical linear models (e.g. Waterfall) aim for a complete and detailed specification at the beginning of the implementation and are not well equipped to react on changes in requirements during the implementation. While for well-defined requirements these models may be efficient, real live experience shows that it is often very challenging for the customer to define the requirements well at the beginning. This aspect is solved by agile models, which expect that requirements will evolve during the project.
Waterfall methodology: a conservative management model which requires a complete project specification before the start of the implementation. The advantage of this model is that the overall project budget can be well estimated at early stage of the project. However, this model requires from the customer to be able to describe the requirements on very detailed level, which is demanding on abstract and analytical thinking. Time and complexity of the specification grows with the project size and in bigger projects prolongs the time needed to start the implementation phase. Disadvantage of Waterfall is costly reworks in case of any change needed during the implementation.
In opposite to the Waterfall, agile models do not require a complete specification before the start of the implementation. The implementation phase starts much faster and is organized into small cycles (increments). Every increment is specified, implemented, and delivered to the customer. Customer checks the increment and adjusts the requirements if necessary. Due to this iterative process, the customer sees the software growing by small steps and can continuously align the requirements to his/her needs.
Agile methodologies represent a structured and iterative approach to project management and product development. It recognizes the volatility of product development and provides a methodology for self-organizing teams to respond to change without going off the rails. The core importance of running the project in an agile way is to utilize the resources at maximum and to enable an instant cooperation between the development team and the customer. The main agile approaches are Scrum and Kanban.
Project management
We have a team of experienced project managers who are experts in agile project management, have extensive experience from dozens of different projects, and use our corporate best practices for the success of projects.
We usually organize our development team following the Kanban methodology and lean development principles supported by tools from the Atlassian stack (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo). This organization supports continuous flow of work enabling the development team to reach the best performance due to a stable focus. At the same time the team can very flexibly react on changes in task prioritization without a need of extensive planning ceremonies.
Due to its versatility, this team organization can be easily adjusted to a wide range of project management models, from conservative to agile. It also allows us to integrate developers from the customer’s side to the team when requested. On the customer’s request we can also organize the team following a Scrum methodology.
Standard project roles in xitee are a project manager, a technical leader, a business analyst, a developer/member of devops team and a tester. The project manager is the main person and a contact responsible for the project on our (provider’s) side. On the customer’s side, the roles of a product owner and a project sponsor are necessary. Having your own IT expert, who can evaluate our performance is also recommended.
The product owner is the main responsible person and a contact for the project from the customer’s side. Depending on a customer’s organizational structure, the product owner acts on his/her own (e.g. makes decisions directly) or coordinates other roles of the customer (e.g. brings topics to the respective management board for decision). One way or another, the product owner is responsible for defining the business requirements, approving the specification and accepting deliverables, coordinates all activities on the customer’s side and controls the project budget.
It is a decision of the customer how closely the product owner will be integrated with the development team. One option is that the product owner can stay separated from the team and provides feedback through regular demo and planning sessions. Other approach is when the product owner can be completely integrated into the team, taking part on daily stand-ups and has a deep insight into the team’s daily work. The general rule is that more agility and less detailed requirements require more intensive collaboration/integration of the product owner with the team.
The project sponsor is an authority who is accountable for the project and this person is involved in the project on the steering level.
UI/UX design
UI design deals with the “user interface”, which is the graphical layout of a solution. This includes the buttons that users click on, texts, images, sliders, text entry fields, and all the rest of the items the user interacts with. It looks into the screen layout, transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction.
UX stands for “user experience”. It focuses on the user and his/her interaction with the product. The goal of UX design in xitee is to bring to our clients and FE developers a real view of the solutions before they are actually made. This gives them a better idea and understanding of the appearance, features, availability on various devices and platforms, and functionality of the software. This can ultimately save considerable funds.
Our approach:
We follow the user centric approach to create highly usable and accessible products for our customers. In the first phase, we are learning and understanding customer business requirements. This means to understand the context in which users may use the solution. In a second phase, we are developing design. The outcomes are subsequently evaluated against the user requirements. We conduct these phases in iterations until the evaluation results are satisfactory. The last stage is then the implementation of final designs.
Benefits or good UI/UX design leads to:
reduced cost for development (no reworks)
increased quality of the solution (by creating user journeys and incorporating the customer feedback)
increased customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty
building customer brand (by incorporating the company design and logo)
ranking higher on Google (as customers have longer interactions with the UX-optimized website).
xitee offers:
user journeys: a user journey is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish the intended task. Typically, it’s presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product. Our goal is to study your users, understand their behavior, and architect a user journey that enables your users to achieve their desired tasks with minimal effort.
wireframes: wireframes represent the journey of the users as they interact with a website or an app, including UI elements such as buttons or images. These are represented in a simplified version using placeholders.
prototypes: prototypes are interactive final versions of the product pre-development which are clickable and enable users to test the main interactions of the product.
post-launch metrics analysis: metrics are the signals that show whether our UX strategy is working. Using metrics is a key to track changes over time. We can help you setup and use analytics tools such Google analytics or Piwik.
IT technology consulting
Technology consulting services are designed to help customers achieve optimal ROI (return on investment) from technology through the fast and cost-effective optimization of their IT systems and processes. xitee brings the expertise, technology, and best practices to deliver secure enterprise solutions that meet both current and future needs while minimizing the risks.
We cooperate with our customers on our way to construct and maintain IT infrastructures that are modern, efficient, scalable, configurable, and cost-effective. Our main focus lies in these areas:
Architecture consulting: our experts help customers to carry out the transition from the outdated and ineffective IT delivery systems and architectures to a cloud-based infrastructure that allows implementation of new technologies into their software strategy.
New Technology adaptation: nowadays, companies need to implement new technologies in order to stay competitive and meet the demands of modern users while they also have to ensure the consistent delivery of high-quality of their IT products and services. We are here to help you with this matter with our devops team using the latest modern technologies.
The world of IT keeps evolving and continuously brings new innovations. These changes can be both an opportunity as well as a threat. Therefore, having an innovative advisor who can help you plan for the long-term, tailor a strategy that fits, and uncover the right tech for your toughest business problems (no matter the industry), is so crucial.
xitee provides a wide range of services to help your organization’s IT effectiveness. Our expert services include specialized services such as digital transformation, business analysis, UI/UX design, project management and IT technology consulting. In the IT technology consulting, the goal is to find the best technology for our clients which supports them in achieving their business objectives.
These services mentioned above can be very beneficial both to the clients with an already existing solution as well as to the ones who want to create a brand new one. We also offer consulting on new solutions either as a part of a complete development project or also individually as a separate service. Our team consists of IT experts with long-term expertise in the areas of change management, software development and requirements management and IT service providers. We can advise and support our customers during the entire process starting from the analysis through the strategy and concept development all the way to the implementation and deployment to production. If required, we can take on interim management tasks as well.
Cloud computing, simply put, is the delivery of computing services. That includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the Internet (“the cloud”) with a clear goal of enabling faster innovation, more flexible usage of resources and economies of scale. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which consequently helps to decrease operating costs, helps to run the infrastructure more efficiently, and scale according to the current needs of your business.
There are three main service models of cloud computing – often visualized in a pyramid where each level of the service model is more specialized than the one before, but it is built on the same basic structure. The one at the bottom (IaaS) is more versatile and customizable fitting to many applications, the one at the top (SaaS) is more specialized and fitting to specific tasks.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is similar to traditional computer hardware (servers, networks, operating systems), but instead of buying the physical hardware, company can purchase the infrastructure as a virtual service through an IaaS provider. These resources are usually easy to scale and offer the customer a complete control over the infrastructure. Examples of IaaS include Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) stands for a platform allowing companies to develop, run, and manage solutions without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure that is typically connected with developing and launching an app. Developers can therefore focus on the software without having to manage operating systems, software updates, and other infrastructure matters. PaaS examples include Microsoft Azure, the Google App Engine.
Software as a Service (SaaS) represents a complete software solution which you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider. Put simply, you rent the use of the particular solution for your organization. Instead of having to install the solution, the users can connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. All of the underlying infrastructure, middleware, app software, and app data are located in the service provider’s data center. The service provider manages the hardware and software, and ensures the availability and security of the app and your data. Examples of SaaS include Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.
Today, the basic division is often enhanced by a fourth dimension – FaaS, going even more specific.
Function as a Service (FaaS) allows customers to execute code responsively without having to allocate processing resources ahead of time. It enables the customers to develop, to run and to manage application functionalities without the need to build and maintain complex infrastructures. This way of app development is often used when building microservices applications and it enables the achievement of the so-called serverless architecture. FaaS examples are AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions.
Another way to divide cloud computing is based on the deployment model.
Cloud deployment describes where the infrastructure for the deployment is hosted and who has access and control to it. There are four deployment models:
Private cloud – an exclusive cloud for the organization, can be on-premise but also off premise
Public cloud – cloud infrastructure is available to the general public and it is owned by the company selling cloud services
Community cloud – the cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns
Hybrid cloud – the cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public)
This division of clouds defines also the deployment strategy used.
We provide our customers with cloud consulting services, cloud infrastructure services, cloud application development and cloud application migration services. On top of that we are active in the field of IoT (Internet of Things).
Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration. With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model. Our cloud-native computing service uses: open-source software stack to be containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.
