With nearly 50 million mobile and broadband connections, Telefónica Germany is one of the country’s leading telecommunications providers. Around 7,500 employees deliver comprehensive services to both private and business customers.

To compete for customers and identify optimization potential, the company is increasingly relying on data. From top management to in-store staff, employees are supplied daily with up-to-date KPIs and tailored recommendations for action. At the same time, the principles of self-service and data democratization are being consistently advanced — meaning that more and more employees are able to analyze data and independently generate business value. To meet this growing demand, the company is now migrating its enterprise-wide data warehouse (DWH) to the cloud.

Transformation Amid Ongoing Operations

“We are undergoing a comprehensive transformation process, with the migration of our operational system landscape to the cloud being a key component,” explains Dr. Jens Johannesson, Head of Data Intelligence (DI) at Telefónica Germany. His team is responsible for the DWH as well as all standard reporting for more than 1,000 users across all business units. “Essentially, we cover the entire customer lifecycle with reliable facts — a service we must maintain even while developing the cloud data warehouse.”
This highlights the project’s biggest challenge: completely replacing the technological foundation without disrupting daily operations. The concept for a seamless transition from the old to the new data landscape was developed together with ORAYLIS.

Strategic Partner for Planning and Execution

Within the overall project, ORAYLIS assumes a wide range of responsibilities. First, the team ensures the continued smooth operation of the reporting and self-service platforms. This doesn’t just mean maintaining the status quo.
“Until the official launch of the cloud platform, we are extending the existing solution in line with new business requirements,” says Alexander Thume, COO at ORAYLIS and responsible for Telefónica Germany. He sees this reliability as a key success factor: “Daily operations must run flawlessly so everyone involved can fully focus on the new solution.”

ORAYLIS is also heavily involved as a strategic advisor in the development of the new data platform. “We guide the technology decision-makers throughout the transformation process. Based on our broad experience and best practices, we provided a recommendation for building the cloud platform. From there, we jointly defined the target architecture and approach. This was based on Microsoft’s Modern Data Warehouse concept, which we then tailored to Telefónica’s needs and made fully scalable.” ORAYLIS also oversees implementation efforts carried out by various development partners.
Another key role is bridging the gap between technology and business users. “Thanks to our long-standing collaboration, we bring deep domain expertise in the telecommunications business. We maintain constant dialogue with the business units, helping to define and prioritize topics. Ensuring that users are involved from the very beginning is critical to the project’s success.”

Enabling Greater Automation

Beyond democratizing data, the cloud-based approach enables increasing automation of data transformation and provisioning processes. “That’s why we rely as much as possible on managed cloud services in our new solution,” says Dr. Johannesson. Core backend components include Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Databricks, while Power BI is used on the frontend as a fully cloud-native service.
With this technical foundation, the company aims to automate decision-making processes to an ever-greater extent. “Particularly at the operational level, we see enormous optimization potential. Just consider how many decisions are made daily in our shops alone — regarding networks, technologies, tariffs, and pricing. With our cloud data platform, we are ideally positioned to support these use cases as well.”

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