powercloud has been able to win customers and generate growth in recent years like no other billing solutions provider. The success is based ultimately on a triad of customer proximity, technological innovations and efficient implementation processes – in which everything is done through the teamwork of proven experts. In this respect, the billing specialists have naturally declared the values of “transparency” and “openness” as strategic corporate goals. This shapes the further development of the service and communication concept.
Amidst an unprecedented wave of digitalization, powercloud has been able to win many customers in recent years – utilities, energy start-ups and municipal utilities. Most recently, for example, the award won by Thüga in Germany made a lot of people take notice. In the future, 38 utilities with various requirements will use one billing platform, the Thüga billing platform (TAP). Unexpectedly for many observers, the choice fell on a solution that uses powercloud as the technical energy management core. Clearly, powercloud has now arrived on the market and has brought along its long-standing customer relationships. But what exactly lies behind this success?
1. Customer proximity: The needs of the user in focus
powercloud, from the beginning, attracted pioneers among clients who placed their trust in the young start-up and brought their own know-how into the relationship. This was the starting point for the development of the solution in the market – marked always by short paths between users and developers. “In terms of how we align customer needs and development needs, we still face a steep learning curve,” says Zoran Petrovic, Managing Director and Chief Growth Officer at powercloud. “At the moment, we must develop our communication and service to be able to adapt both to the strong growth and to the increasingly diverse client portfolio. From small municipal utilities to large competitive utilities, we want to cover the entire range of service and information needs for these partners.” In real terms, this means that powercloud relies on a rapidly growing service desk and additional support from ever more partners. “More resources in the service desk alone, however, is not enough,” says Zoran. “We think long term. Most users want to solve their problems themselves. This is why we are compiling extensive technical documentation and digital training content. This saves time and lets us focus better on the challenges facing the energy industry.”
2. Innovations: Escaping rigid systems
The second pillar that powercloud’s success rests on is continuous technological innovation behind the platform idea. The motto here is to escape the rigid systems of the past and move into a highly flexible cloud platform solution that can be customized swiftly. This is made possible by, among other things, an app store – very much like what you know from your smartphone. A world of opportunities opens up here for businesses to respond to changing markets and infrastructure quickly and without having to set up costly IT projects. Moreover, powercloud is based on an open-source architecture which ensures a high degree of independence from suppliers and technologies. Or, put another way, the open and transparent philosophy behind the technology is an open door for technology partners and industry partners to enter through. They transfer their know-how into “powerApps” – the holistic platform solution from powercloud becomes the enabler for new business sectors and models. The associated “innovation inflow” therefore never dries up.
3. Efficient implementation: A matter of weeks
Finally, a few words about implementing the cloud-based system that resolves crucial issues for users of legacy systems. In the past, modernizing their IT solution invariably took a long time for many users. The powercloud implementation, in contrast, uses a standardized best-practice process with defined onboarding modules. Depending on the starting point, the end-to-end solution is ready in just a few weeks, can be scaled at any time, and can also be rolled out for new business sectors and in new countries, for example. At the same time, the solution is in no way a “plug-in” – stability, speed, and cost-efficiency all remain at a high level.
Customer proximity, technological innovations, and efficient implementation processes – the success of powercloud is based on this triad. powercloud will rely on these points to check even more closely in the future whether the current solutions meet customer needs; what exactly do users need for their tasks, which solutions help quickly, and where do problems emerge. “To find the answers, we will be conducting regular surveys from now on,” says Marco Beicht, Founder and CEO of powercloud. “We will actively collect the survey feedback, and from it, come up with concrete measures for the entire organization and for our product. Being close to our customers matters a great deal to us. Only in this way can we operate over the long term – an open platform with a growing ecosystem that will help our customers run their businesses day to day and help solve the long-term challenges of the energy transition and digitalization.”
