New Microsoft customer story: First Gas connects “spaghetti bowl” of systems in just four months

First Gas came into being in April 2016 as the result of a merger between two leading gas pipeline businesses in New Zealand. To implement 10 major business systems in just four months, First Gas turned to the Microsoft cloud. It used Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its customer relationship management backbone and Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 for financial management, and it linked these and eight other systems in the cloud using Microsoft Azure Logic Apps. The work of connecting the complex mix of cloud and on-premises systems took just a few months, saving First Gas millions of dollars in third-party software leasing fees.

Huw Griffiths, Chief Information Officer for First Gas, explains:

We had 10 different business systems that needed to talk to one another and exchange data. Theta accomplished this in quite an elegant and cost-effective fashion using Microsoft Azure Logic Apps, the Microsoft cloud-based application integration service, which was in preview at the time. With great support from Microsoft, we were confident that it could do the job, even ahead of the product’s general release.

He adds:

The integration job was especially impressive. I worked on a traditional system integration project in a previous job, and it took many months and had all kinds of communication snafus. This time, we drew out the whole architecture on a giant whiteboard about 10 feet long and said, "Good grief, that’s complicated." But Theta took it and ran with it and delivered against that spaghetti bowl of linkages. Without Logic Apps, there’s no way we would have accomplished this level of integration in four months. If the interoperability task had taken a year, the usual time frame for projects this big, we would have spent millions of dollars in SaaS fees.

This project was also a winner in the Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards, in the ERP category.