What is an EV charging platform migration?
A platform migration is the process of moving EV charging operations, including data, users, charging sessions, and resources, from one software platform to another. As a business owner, your EV charging management platform is the tool that simplifies (or hinders!) your asset management and ensures the scalability of your business. A new solution can allow you to scale across markets and accommodate a broader range of use cases. It can optimize your performance and increase your capabilities to deliver a better service.
Why migrate from your current software solution?
Business owners undertake platform migrations to improve capabilities, reduce costs, boost performance and keep up with current technologies. They generally fall into two main types: existing in-house solutions and third-party software solution providers.
1. Migrating from an in-house solution
Building your own solution to suit your business needs may have made sense at the beginning of your EV charging business journey, but can you keep up with the ever-evolving EV charging market and the complex use cases? How many people do you have working on maintaining your solution?
Consider where to place your focus. Investing resources into growing your network or devoting development efforts to your user app, where you can add the most value and build a competitive advantage, would likely be more impactful to your bottom line. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the benefits of switching to a ready-made solution than continuing to develop your own or build one from scratch:
- Focus on your core business and priorities rather than investing time and resources in developing and supporting your own software
- Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) with scalable cloud software, eliminating the need to support internal infrastructure.
- Invest current development resources in building new key features and improving your customers’ experience rather than fixing bugs
- Rest assured, all industry standards and protocols are supported: OCPP, Eichrecht, OpenADR, Autocharge, OCPI, etc. The EV charging industry is fast-paced, and your solution needs to keep up, requiring a development team that can comply with this.
- Update the tech stack or language used to support your software. This means less hassle and less expense. Sometimes systems built in-house are written in older programming languages that only a few people can support.
2. Migrating from a third-party solution
Technical limitations are one of the main reasons business owners migrate their solutions. Difficulties in scaling and the inability to accommodate new use cases and expand into new markets hinder your business growth. Not only are you unable to meet your business requirements now, but the lack of platform capabilities renders you unable to meet future technical and market-specific requirements.
Another cause of frustration is the lack of features. Not having the necessary flexibility with payment plans, pricing, roaming, or the ability to control certain aspects of your business can severely impact your progress. This causes you to fall behind in comparison to your competitors, and often, you implement unreliable and insufficient workarounds to compensate.
Finally, the lack of support can tip the balance towards migrating to another platform. A software provider that is slow to answer requests and solve critical issues translates into missed revenue for you and a bad user experience for your customers. You may need extra development resources to build custom features or configurations to secure your competitive advantage, which you don’t receive as this requires extra time that your provider cannot supply.
When is the right time to migrate to a new platform?
Considering the challenges in both cases, when using your own solution or a sub-optimal software provider, when is the ideal time to migrate to a new EV charging platform?
Case 1: Your business is hindered by your software solution or current provider.
Even though migrations are not a single-click quick fix, the sooner you start migrating your platform, the better. Your current problems will only get deeper and be more detrimental to your business. These issues could be the lack of technical capabilities and features and the level of support and service you receive. Act fast, and do not delay the decision to migrate to a software management platform that will take your business to the next level.
Case 2: When you are planning a significant change in business operations
As a savvy entrepreneur, you can see where the market is headed and know that your current solution won’t let you reap the benefits. Platform migrations are an excellent opportunity to reevaluate your business and undergo a positive transformation. As a new solution opens up more growth opportunities, you could consider entering new markets, covering new use cases, testing new business models, or changing your chargers.
How AMPECO can help
At AMPECO, we have experience with platform migrations from in-house solutions and third-party software providers. We know this is a significant process for your business and one you cannot do alone. You can trust us to lead the whole process and offer advice based on a wealth of business knowledge from clients around the world.
AMPECO is committed to building and maintaining a superior software platform that helps our clients succeed. As the focus is on optimizing your business, the end goal of a successful migration is not to transfer everything from one platform to another but rather to set up your operations in such a way that you end up with a superior overall setup. You can rely on our expertise and hands-on approach during each step.
Your success is our success, so we walk the extra mile for each client to ensure they reach their goals. Talk to one of our EV charging experts, and we’ll help you take the next step.
