Interview with Ingeborg Gjærum, Chief Strategy Officer & Director of Organisational Development, Volue.
For those who aren’t familiar with Volue, can you make a short introduction?
Volue is a market leader in technologies and services that power the green transition. We have 50 years of experience providing software solutions, services, data, and insight to industries critical to society. We are over 700 employees working with more than 2,200 customers across energy, power grid, water and infrastructure projects. Volue is headquartered in Oslo and is active in more than 40 countries.
Among Volue’s international energy customers are eight of the ten largest European utilities, including EnBW, E.ON, Fortum, RWE, Uniper, and Vattenfall.
Volue works across several verticals. Where in your opinion are the most exciting career opportunities?
It very much depends on your skills, experience and, of course, passion. Our team is growing and we are on the lookout for people who understand software, love to analyse business processes and are excited about digitalisation – and who want to make an impact when it comes to sustainability. Customers often tell us that our projects go beyond IT implementation and bring about business change.
Getting more women in the room is especially important to us.
Our Optimisation product line helps power producers move away from manual processes and embrace automation. With a growing share of renewables, power production planning and trading are becoming a real challenge for them. The Power Grid team develops software that enables power grid operators to design, maintain, analyse and monitor the power grid in real-time. The Water and Construction business lines are working to digitalise water and construction, and our Industrial IoT supply advanced and reliable instrumentation and communication solutions for demanding environments
Big data and data analytics are transforming the tech industry. How does data come into Volue solutions?
It’s all about data now and it gets interesting with renewables. Given the intermittent nature of solar and wind, power utilities require access to real-time, reliable and accurate data and forecasts. Our Insight team sees a staggering 1 800 000 000 daily calls to the Volue API. Weather-driven data and market forecasts are in equally high demand. Weather data is collected through sensors and instrumentation spread around the world. In Scandinavia, thousands of automatic meteorology and hydrology stations built by the Industrial IoT team (among many other instrumentation and automation devices) collect data for organisations such as the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
We are truly committed to diversity and inclusion and believe that the sustainability challenges ahead of us call for innovation and new thinking.
AI is becoming a prerequisite for software technology across industries. Do you use AI and machine learning in your solutions?
We couldn’t do without AI and machine learning. The power markets are getting faster and the more data we get, the more difficult it is for us humans to grasp it on our own. The machines can process the data more easily.
ESG is important for those looking to join companies that care for people and the planet. How is Volue doing in this respect?
We are truly committed to diversity and inclusion and believe that the sustainability challenges ahead of us call for innovation and new thinking. Getting more women in the room is especially important to us. Our role in securing a sustainable future is clear. Join us!
Text: Volue