Saving the Baltic Sea one sewer at the time – Codento boosts Underground City’s internationalization efforts

Saving the Baltic Sea one sewer at the time – Codento boosts Underground City’s internationalization efforts

Underground City is a growth company with a bold mission: to preserve our waterways and environment for future generations by revolutionizing sewer network asset management. The company provides water utility operators with cost-effective and sustainable solutions for fault detection and repair. The objective is nothing less than protecting the Baltic Sea – one sewer at the time.

What was the challenge?

Underground City is also striving to digitize the field of assessing sewer conditions. “This industry has operated with the same ‘man and a trailer’ concept for decades,” says the company’s investor and CEO Jyrki Kontio, and continues: “Waste and stormwater sewers are scanned with expensive video technology piece by piece, which in practice ends up leaving 95% of them unscreened. After this, repairs are attempted to be made proactively, but for the most part, operators have to rely on guesswork.”

Underground City was founded in 2016 by a father and son, Sakari and Jussi Kuikka, who both have extensive experience in the sewer industry. A couple of years ago, the company’s core team was strengthened by three seasoned growth company investors, one of whom was Jyrki Kontio. At that time, Underground City’s digital development was still in its early stages, as was typical for players in the industry.

The team set an ambitious goal to create a comprehensive, packaged offering for water utilities. The offering would be centered around the software solution they had previously developed for sewer condition assessment. However, the existing application was not scalable enough to serve as the core of the company’s internationalizing and scalable business. “The software was originally built on a solid foundation, but over time, it evolved through prototyping and was practically held together with duct tape,” Kontio describes. Recognizing this, the team saw the need to renew the software to meet international and professional standards.

Our solution

Even though Underground City’s expanded core team had strong expertise in the sewer industry combined with high-level software production experience, including individuals with both professor-level and listed company expertise, it was clear that they would still need outside help for the software renewal. “We are a growth company that cannot simply establish its own software department,” Kontio describes the situation. “We needed competent and long-term partners with the right knowledge, skills, and experience.”

Underground City chose Codento as their software architecture partner. Codento’s experts designed the architecture for the renewed software solution following the five core pillars of the Google Cloud Architecture Framework. These pillars relate to efficient cloud usage, data privacy and security, service reliability, and cost and performance optimization. The architectural design also leveraged the Google Cloud Enterprise Foundations Blueprint (formerly known as Security Foundations).

According to these guidelines, Codento implemented a secure, cost-effective, and reliable environment for Underground City using the Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules. This resulted in a cloud environment that is easy to manage, use, and scale for future needs.

Why Codento?

The Underground City team was impressed by previous co-operation with Codento’s key personnel, their strong experience with Google Cloud – Underground City’s chosen application platform – and their flexible operating model. This confidence was so strong that Underground City decided to skip a lengthy tendering process to select a partner.

When asked to describe the collaboration with Codento in three words, Kontio summarizes:”’Good, skilled, and flexible.” He then continues: “I would summarize our approach as outsourcing wisely but knowing exactly what we want. Codento is a great partner for just this model of operation.”

What were the results?

“Today, we are on a completely different level than when we started the collaboration with Codento. Through this cooperation, we have been able to productize our software to a level that is acceptable to international customers,” Jyrki Kontio rejoices. The built solution will also enable Underground City to utilize advanced analytics and AI in the future.

“In this industry, the offering we have built will benefit society, nature, and water utilities. Now, the software is a solid cornerstone for us, helping to drive the company towards the international growth we are aiming at.” Kontio concludes.

Underground City’s Google Cloud architecture and landing zone were designed according to Google Cloud Architecture Framework using the templates provided by Google. The initial design was created iteratively with regular customer review and feedback sessions. The cloud environment was built following GCAF best practices and foundation blueprints.

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