ANS and Calisen: A Four-Year Partnership Driving Digital Transformation

Watch the video: Calisen & ANS Success Story

Background

Calisen is a Manchester-based energy infrastructure business that owns, installs and manages 40% of all the smart metres in the UK. With a vision to deliver smarter energy for all, Calisen helps energy companies and partners put infrastructure into homes to help customers and businesses better manage their energy usage.

From a technology perspective, Calisen’s aim was to become more of a digital-first organisation: utilising the right tech to drive its growth ambitions and ensure the safety and security of its digital estate. Which is why, four years ago, Calisen approached ANS – initially to migrate several on-premises data centres into a consolidated Azure cloud platform, then to onboard a Managed Cloud service, followed by a Managed Security Operations Centre (SOC) service to deliver 24x7x365 monitoring, identification and remediation of cybersecurity threats, and a Centre of Excellence (CoE) arrangement to provide monthly resource to drive key technology initiatives across cloud, security and data.

Challenge

As Calisen looked to the future, it wanted to leverage the relationship with ANS for specific platform developments that would deliver more for partners and customers. A key initiative identified to support this was to replace the legacy CRM platform used by Calisen’s engineer workforce to install metres and take data readings, which was inefficient, out of support and no longer cost effective.

Solution

ANS worked with Calisen to scope the Microsoft Dynamics 365 product, providing expertise on how best it could be used to meet the goals of the organisation, as well providing guidance on integrations and synergies with other parts of the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Power Platform.

“We have a number of people at ANS we speak to regularly, right from the CEO down. It’s a good relationship, and we have great conversations that help us move forward as a business, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Nadeem Shafi – IT Director, Calisen

Outcomes

The first release of the new Dynamics 365 CRM platform rolled out in 2025. It is a modern, robust CRM system that allows Calisen to deliver more flexibility and more capabilities for its partners and customers.

As an organisation that uses and produces a significant amount of data, the platform will help Calisen deliver greater efficiencies across the value chain, as well as provide a strong foundation to securely consolidate its data for the purposes of AI experimentation in the future.

“When I look at ANS, I see a Microsoft-accredited AI partner who has the expertise to answer the question of what the potential for AI is. I know AI will have a role to play and I know ANS can help us identify what it can do for our business and help us achieve our growth goals.”

Matthew Batemen – Chief Operating Officer, Calisen

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