Velian is moving a growing share of its Dutch electric-vehicle charging network onto AMPECO’s management software while bringing roaming, connectivity, and business invoicing under greater internal control, turning a platform migration into a wider redesign of how the operator runs its infrastructure.

Velian operates more than 33,000 public and business charging points across the Netherlands, although the AMPECO agreement does not mean all of those chargers will move at once. The operator is undertaking a phased migration covering a core and expanding share of the estate, with some B2B customers already live and public infrastructure following across several Dutch regions.

Public chargers in Groningen and Drenthe are due to follow the initial B2B group, while Amsterdam and Utrecht are planned towards the end of the year. AMPECO says the migration uses a proxy-based cutover intended to keep chargers operating as they switch platforms rather than requiring a visible interruption for drivers.

The software change is accompanied by a deliberate move to own more of the operational stack. Velian is taking greater responsibility for roaming agreements, SIM connectivity, and B2B invoicing while using a dedicated single-tenant AMPECO environment rather than sharing the same application instance with other operators.

Charging networks are software estates

A public charging point may look like a relatively simple piece of roadside electrical equipment, but operating thousands of units requires a collection of software and commercial systems behind it. Chargers have to communicate their status, start and stop sessions, apply tariffs, authenticate users, exchange roaming information, generate billing data, report faults, and integrate with payment, maintenance, and energy-management services.

Those dependencies grow as an operator expands because the physical estate rarely consists of one generation of identical hardware. Velian has been operating charging infrastructure for more than 14 years and uses refurbishment and return programmes to extend the working life of equipment, leaving its software layer to support devices from different periods and suppliers rather than a uniform fleet.

AMPECO says its platform supports equipment from more than 200 hardware manufacturers and more than 400 charge-point models. Velian placed API access and hardware flexibility among its selection criteria partly because it wants the option to choose equipment according to the needs of individual sites rather than designing projects around restrictions imposed by a management platform.

That flexibility has practical value in the Netherlands, where constraints on the electricity network can affect how much charging capacity can be installed at a particular location. Software cannot create grid capacity that does not exist, but an operator needs the ability to connect its own energy-management tools, configure charging behaviour, and combine different hardware where local conditions require it.

Roaming control moves back to the operator

Velian is also shifting away from fully managed roaming and intends to handle agreements more directly, with its own roaming manager overseeing relationships with other charging networks and mobility-service providers. The underlying platform will handle session and Open Charge Point Interface records needed to operate those connections.

Roaming is an important but largely invisible part of public charging because a driver may use an account issued by one company at a charger operated by another. Behind that session, the companies have to exchange availability, identification, tariff, and billing information and settle the commercial terms between them.

Handing those relationships to an intermediary can simplify operations, while direct management gives the charging operator more control over counterparties and commercial conditions. Velian is choosing the latter model, meaning the technology migration brings additional responsibility into the business rather than outsourcing more of it.

B2B invoicing and connectivity follow a similar logic. SIM services provide the communications channel between many chargers and their backend systems, while invoicing turns charging data into customer and partner payments. Owning more of those layers can reduce dependence on bundled service providers, although it also requires the operator to maintain expertise and processes that managed services would otherwise supply.

Migration risk is measured at the charger

The hardest part of changing a charge-point management system is that the infrastructure is already in daily use. Unlike replacing an internal office application over a weekend, a public network has thousands of geographically dispersed endpoints that drivers expect to work continuously, often under municipal contracts and service-level obligations.

Velian says it targets availability above 99% across its national operation, which means a migration that disconnects large numbers of chargers would undermine the objective of the project. AMPECO says more than 300,000 charge points are connected to its platform and that more than 140,000 arrived through migrations from other systems, using that experience as the basis for the proxy approach being used with Velian.

A phased rollout limits the size of each cutover and creates an opportunity to identify integration problems before the largest public estates move. It also means the old and new operating models can coexist for a period, creating its own reconciliation burden around customer data, tariffs, roaming, monitoring, and support.

Security is another reason Velian selected a dedicated environment. A single-tenant deployment allows the operator to maintain its own configuration and control release-testing windows, separating its instance from those used by other customers. Isolation does not remove application or infrastructure risk, but it changes the potential blast radius of some platform problems and gives Velian more control over when changes reach production.

European regulation adds another layer to the software estate, particularly as charging operators respond to requirements around payment, pricing transparency, interoperability, and public infrastructure. Keeping those changes inside a central platform can reduce the amount of bespoke work required at every charger, although operators remain responsible for ensuring that the service meets the rules and contract terms applying to their networks.

The Velian project is therefore less a story about replacing one software vendor with another than about deciding which parts of a charging business should remain under the operator’s control. Hardware continues to sit at roadsides, workplaces, and other sites across the Netherlands, but roaming, tariffs, billing, connectivity, energy integration, and maintenance increasingly depend on the software architecture behind those boxes.

The migration will be tested as public chargers move through Groningen, Drenthe, Amsterdam, and Utrecht over the coming months. If those cutovers remain invisible to drivers while Velian assumes more direct control of the commercial and operational layers behind them, the project will have changed more than a platform: it will have changed who controls the network’s operating model.