powercloud Delivers Customer-Centric Experiences to Utilities Using AWS

In the highly competitive German energy and utility market, the right technology can give companies an advantage. But many have outdated technology for back-office functions such as billing, finance, and regulatory processes. powercloud’s software as a service (SaaS) solutions operating on AWS offer a better option. Used by 5 of the 6 biggest energy and utility companies in Germany, powercloud automates and streamlines business-critical functions. Its solutions have increased its customers’ operational efficiency, reduced their costs by up to 80 percent, and improved customer experience for their millions of energy users. Using AWS also allows powercloud to quickly scale resources to support international expansion and to securely store sensitive customer information, easing compliance burdens for utilities.

In the highly-competitive German energy and utility market, the right technology can give companies an advantage over rivals. But many of these businesses have resisted the move to modern solutions for back-office and financial functions such as billing, finance, and regulatory processes.

Software as a service (SaaS) company powercloud wanted to give its energy and utilities customers a better option than the outdated, slow, and rigid systems they’d been using. To accomplish this, powercloud built its modular cloud-native solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its solutions streamline and automate business processes, so customers can focus on core tasks that drive competitive advantage.

powercloud’s SaaS solutions have increased its customers’ operational efficiency, reduced their costs by up to 80 percent, and improved customer experience for their millions of energy users. Using AWS also allows powercloud to quickly scale resources to support international expansion and to securely store sensitive customer information, easing compliance burdens for utilities.

Before powercloud launched its cloud-native solutions, the company needed to undertake its own cloud journey. To win tier 1 energy and utility customers, it required the flexibility to add modular services based on customer needs, and to scale to its customers’ expanding subscriber bases. To gain this flexibility, powercloud developed a data-driven and cloud-based architecture using AWS.

The powercloud and AWS teams collaborated closely from the start, with AWS supporting the execution and development of powercloud’s solutions. powercloud also received industry-specific advice from the AWS internal power and utility advisory team—a US-based network of industry experts. “We have a good relationship with AWS, and have grown with them,” says Zoran Petrovic, managing director and chief growth officer at powercloud. “We’ve created a solution that excites the energy market.”

Using AWS, powercloud sped up product development with fast test environments. The company also adapted its architecture to respond to evolving customer needs, whether they are tier 1 operators, municipal utilities, or energy startups. “The pace of execution is good,” says Petrovic. “From our perspective, our SaaS platform working on top of the solid foundations of AWS is a complete product.”

Today 5 of the 6 biggest energy and utility companies in Germany use powercloud’s billing, finance, and back-office solutions. In addition to serving around 10 million existing end-user customers, powercloud has another 20 million end users in the process of migration.

powercloud’s SaaS solutions improved operational efficiency for its energy and utility customers by automating processes such as billing and simplifying customer onboarding. This has enabled powercloud customers to decrease their total cost of ownership by up to 80 percent, and reduce the cost to serve end-user customers from around €30 to an average of just €10 per end-user customer per year.

The flexibility of the solutions also gives energy and utility businesses the ability to launch new services for their customers in hours rather than days. This has improved customer experience and loyalty.

powercloud protects its customers’ sensitive customer data using AWS Key Management Service (KMS), which allows it to easily create and control the keys used to encrypt or digitally sign its data. “AWS has implemented security standards that other companies with on-premises services can’t even reach,” says Petrovic. “We have measurements in place that other small companies do not offer.”

powercloud stores customer data in Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. It also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, and Amazon ElastiCache to unlock microsecond latency and scale with in-memory caching.

For customers that need to fulfil data protection requirements about where customer information is stored, powercloud uses AWS Regions and Availability Zones to ensure data remains in the required location. This eases compliance burden for its customers, who no longer have to worry if their customer data is protected.

powercloud now has plans for international expansion. Its pipeline of new customers includes businesses across Europe, North America, and Australia. The scalability of AWS supports this growth. “As we expand to new countries, with new customers, we know we can confidently and easily deliver our solutions,” says Petrovic.