The energy transition requires smart IT: Thüga SmartService relies on Microsoft Azure

The challenge: Rising data volumes and increasing investments

Thüga SmartService GmbH offers its customers—municipal utilities, energy suppliers, and distribution network operators—a wide range of complete solutions as well as solutions for individual processes, specially tailored to the requirements of an increasingly digitalized energy industry. The products in the company’s portfolio fit together seamlessly and cover the entire value chain from a single source.

A key example of this is the meter-to-cash process chain: end customers can conveniently view their energy consumption on an online portal. Consumption data is automatically recorded by smart meters and transmitted to Thüga SmartService, where it is processed and shared with market partners. Billing is then carried out using the SAP system. Business tasks such as accounting and customer management are controlled centrally via the ERP system based on SAP S/4HANA. In this way, the platform architecture ensures consistently mapped processes.

With increasing demands on scalability, security, and flexibility, the on-premises SAP landscape was gradually reaching its limits. The result was additional costs and investments, for example in new hardware, in order to handle the huge and continuously growing amounts of data. This conflicted with Thüga SmartService’s need to be able to scale flexibly and cost-effectively with growth in the future.

“In order to offer our customers the cost efficiency they’re accustomed to with the highest security standards, flexibility, and reliability, we decided to migrate the on-premises SAP landscape to the cloud,” says Christoph Mayer, Director of IT at Thüga SmartService. “This allows us to respond more quickly and efficiently to new requirements.” And since Thüga SmartService already uses various services from the Microsoft portfolio, it quickly became clear that migrating the systems to the Azure cloud platform was the next logical step.

The solution: Scalable infrastructure and more flexible data processing thanks to Microsoft Azure

The entire SAP landscape at Thüga SmartService has already been successfully migrated. “Our employees really put their backs into the migration and invested every spare minute they had in it,” Mayer says. This dedication paid off, and the migration was completed at the end of May 2025. The first benefits are already becoming apparent: Flexibility and cost efficiency have increased significantly, as capacity can be increased or reduced as needed and only actual usage has to be paid for. “Without the migration to the Azure cloud platform, our operating costs would have increased by up to 40%,” Mayer says. “Now we’re also able to operate specific systems only at certain times. This allows us to adapt resources quickly and in line with demand.”

By moving to the cloud, Thüga SmartService can also respond flexibly to growing data processing and storage requirements—and manage the ever-increasing volumes of data more efficiently. “This frees up our teams to focus on strategic tasks,” Mayer adds. Furthermore, Azure ensures that data is processed, stored, and encrypted in compliance with data protection regulations at all times and is continuously monitored.

The cloud solution based on Azure has fundamentally changed the provision of IT services at Thüga SmartService: They can now be operated in a more future-proof, scalable, and efficient manner without changing the customer interface. “Our services coordinate well with each other and have been proving their worth for many years. Therefore, it was important to us to maintain this familiar quality and reliability. While customers continue to use the services they know, we benefit from a modern and flexible infrastructure in the background,” Mayer explains. With every change—whether external or internal—the company reassesses the situation and decides on the most appropriate solution, always focusing on the greatest possible benefit for its customers. “We’ll continue to migrate additional systems to the cloud in the future if it makes sense for us from a functional, technical, and economic perspective. With Azure, we have the perfect basis for scaling flexibly and operating any conceivable database size,” Mayer says.

Thüga SmartService pursues a clear cloud-first strategy—although not at all costs. “Some of our systems will continue to run on-premises for the time being. However, we’re also always reviewing whether migration to the cloud is economically and technically feasible and will then act accordingly,” Mayer says.

With this approach, Thüga SmartService remains at the cutting edge and gains additional opportunities to steadily expand its portfolio, for example with AI. This leads to further innovations that are changing the energy market.