Stantec uses Azure to build a digital innovation platform with real-world impact

Spanning work for both public and private agencies in a wide variety of sectors and markets, Stantec develops innovative solutions to solve problems for its clients, and it’s now applying the same mindset to the digital realm. “Our goal is to be able to access a wealth of knowledge and deliver it through not only our core professional services, but our digital products,” says Jeff Albee, Vice President of Digital Solutions at Stantec. Adds Andrew Norris, Director of Digital Platform Governance and Strategy at Stantec, “Our focus is on developing digital products and services using all of the data that’s now widely available to help our clients do more with less.”

Building innovative technology products to create client value

Stantec uses Azure to bring these new digital solutions to market. With four products currently available in the Azure Marketplace, the company is launching digital products to address challenges such as predicting and managing flood events. The company’s unique skill set and customer relationships, coupled with the Azure platform’s powerful technologies, combine to create powerful joint capabilities. “We want to be at the forefront of breakthrough technologies like high-performance computing and AI capabilities for our clients’ benefit,” says Norris. “Azure helps us assess new technologies as they become available and figure out how to add them on top of our existing delivery process to further add client value.”

Stantec Connect is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that provides templatized Azure-based building blocks for the development of applications that enable digitally assisted science, engineering, and design with an ever-expanding catalog of client-customizable services. Connect is used both internally by Stantec to build its own solutions and as a platform for external customers to use. “We’re not viewed as a traditional software company, but we wanted a tool set that would allow us to digitally engage across different parts of the business,” says Albee. The company created modules in Azure to address functions such as cloud-scale parallel computing, data insights, machine learning and AI, and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities. “Azure helps us rapidly build software products in Connect, allowing our teams to keep focusing on customers ahead of the technology.”

A powerful example of the type of solution that can be built on Connect is Stantec’s Flood Manager, which helps prepare and protect communities by enabling scientists and engineers to quickly run models to help understand potential flood risks. This involves analyzing enormous amounts of data, such as information on river levels, land use, and water runoff patterns. Using Azure high-performance computing (HPC), Stantec is refining its automation for ingesting and managing the data. “We’re now 26 times faster than we were just nine months ago in terms of gathering data,” says Norris. Processing times for running models has also improved. “We can take what used to be a serial process and run that in multiple parallel streams,” says Norris. “That parallel capability is something that’s unique, and we’ve optimized the choice of Azure products so that customers maximize their spend.” Adds Norris, “With the incredible horsepower available in Azure, we can run physics-based models many times faster to help agencies understand where their risks are coming from.”

Stantec also developed another related application called Flood Predictor, which uses Azure AI Infrastructure, Azure Machine Learning capabilities, and Azure Databricks for data insights. Flood Predictor can provide accurate, data-driven information on where a flood is likely to occur in near real time, helping Stantec’s customers achieve from 85 to 95 percent correlation with physics-based hydrology models. For highly accurate results, Flood Manager uses a deterministic approach where a user needs mapping data ahead of time. Flood Predictor instead uses a probabilistic approach, incorporating continuous learning improvements. An emergency planner can use Flood Predictor to examine an unmapped area to ask what an outcome would be and get a very high correlation with the fully engineered result in only six minutes. “We’re using the full Azure tool set in the delivery of this product, and Azure Machine Learning has really unlocked that for us,” says Albee.

The company’s deployment runs primarily on Windows Server on Azure, but it occasionally needs to integrate some Linux functionality, as was the case with a huge model addressing coastal flood planning. Stantec and Microsoft collaborated on the effort with great success. “We seamlessly ran Linux and Windows together on Azure with no issues at all and no technical challenges for the HPC, even with massive models,” says Albee.

A market leader in financial consulting for municipalities and utilities, Stantec has embedded that financial expertise in FAMS (Financial Analysis and Management System), which is also hosted on Azure. FAMS is a financial modeling and planning application that helps users quickly create sustainable and socially equitable financial plans. Moreover, the newest version of FAMS is designed for smaller to midsize communities and agencies who might not have the access or resources required to hire a consultant to help with capital expenditure planning. FAMS puts at their fingertips the ability to do some of the five-year or ten-year planning that they would otherwise rely on consultants for, providing a more cost-effective approach to basic financial planning. And being cloud-based, FAMS builds in an extra level of resiliency within these communities, creating a consistent, real-time interface with a significantly reduced risk of user error, setting them up for financial sustainability.

Strengthening security and sustainability

Among the most highly rated international architecture, engineering, and construction firms on sustainability measures, Stantec is an ISO 27001–certified security entity, a core element of all the products it sells and uses. “We’re confident that using Azure compute is the right choice because it’s being managed by a company that takes sustainability as seriously as we do,” says Albee.

As such, Azure security capabilities are vitally important. “As we roll out digital products, we want to be sure that we’re continuing to build a very strong security posture into our commercial environment,” notes Albee. “Azure provides us with preconfigured policies, templates, and techniques and gives us confidence that we’re meeting regulatory requirements for all the areas in which we operate globally.”

Achieving a powerful synergy through partnership

Microsoft technologies have driven Stantec’s core IT functions during its long-standing relationship with Microsoft. As is often the case with Microsoft enterprise customers, the relationship centered around functional teams and delivery of everyday services that are necessary to operate the company’s business. But the partnership between Stantec and Microsoft is something altogether different now. “We wanted to make sure to capitalize on our existing experience and infrastructure that was already underpinned by Microsoft, to flow seamlessly into new offerings,” remarks Albee. Stantec collaborated with Azure teams to optimize the architecture and approach, deciding where the company should focus and how to move rapidly. “This approach has absolutely been a game-changer for how quickly we can get our products to market,” he continues. “Our future success is about better understanding customers end-to-end and how the partnership can help solve problems. Stantec’s partnership with Microsoft is really starting to unlock something new, and we’re both helping the same customers at the same time.”

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