CSN Energy
- Title: Hands-On CTO
- Website: http://csnenergy.com
Company
CSN Energy provided a SaaS white-label solution to French energy suppliers.
Team
I was hired as the CTO for the UK company and worked closely with the UK MD and product owner. I recruited two developers for the project; however, they joined toward the end of my tenure, so I completed the majority of the work on the product myself.
Challenge
I was hired to investigate and potentially implement the expansion of the French SaaS energy platform into the UK market. Working closely with the UK product owner, I analysed the regulatory and technical requirements and designed a proposed end-to-end solution tailored to the UK energy sector.
As part of this work, I developed a working website demo and prototype back-office system. To support industry-standard data exchange, we began transforming the DTS specification into a usable codebase by generating strongly-typed classes from the published schemas. We also secured developer access to ElectraLink’s DTS demo environment and FTP server so that we could send and receive DTS flows as part of the validation process.
Results
The technical solution and product demo were well-received in early pre-sales meetings, and we successfully established DTS data-flow integration using ElectraLink’s demo environment.
However, there was limited commercial overlap with the existing French SaaS product, and the UK enterprise sales cycle for energy-sector platforms typically extends over several years. As a result, there was insufficient short-term traction to justify full product development.
Despite positive technical progress, the UK business was not adequately resourced to support delivery of the programme. I therefore chose to leave the company.