Stadtwerke München (SWM) is one of Germany's largest municipal utilities, supplying the city of Munich around the clock with electricity, natural gas, district heating and cooling, drinking water, mobility, and telecommunications. Behind that public-facing supply role sits a sophisticated energy trading operation, managing a complex, mixed portfolio of conventional generation, renewables, and battery assets alongside a Virtual Power Plant that depends on real-time data from many different generation sources.
Across the trading operation, algo trading, trade & risk management, forecasting, and balancing all run in parallel, and every one of them relies on accurate, continuously updated time series data. Because no single off-the-shelf system can cover all of these processes, SWM requires a deliberate best-of-breed strategy, integrating specialist systems through strong, standardized APIs.
For SWM, energy trading at scale demands a time series backbone that is process-neutral, cloud-native, and fully interoperable, and its existing setup could no longer deliver that.
After more than a decade in operation, SWM's legacy platform, which combined a time series database, master data, and workflow orchestration in a single system, had become technically obsolete. At the same time, the landscape it needed to support kept growing more intricate, spanning regulatory reporting, asset optimization, forecasting, the Virtual Power Plant, algo trading, and billing. With no single product able to cover all of these, multiple specialized systems had to coexist and exchange data reliably.
Most market alternatives made that harder rather than easier. Many were ETRM or scheduling systems with time series capability bolted on as an add-on, making them process-dependent rather than neutral. Others lacked cloud-native design or offered only basic API coverage, forcing custom development for even routine integration. And with market and regulatory requirements changing constantly, SWM needed an IT landscape it could adapt quickly, not one that tied it to a single vendor's roadmap.
SWM chose Volue PowerTSM as the time series core of its energy data hub. Of all the options evaluated, it was the only one that met the full requirement without compromise — and the only one that did so without asking SWM to bend its processes to the tool.
PowerTSM anchors a clear architectural approach. A small set of best-of-breed systems each handles its own core competency, avoiding the trade-offs of a monolithic all-in-one platform. Requirements that no vendor covers are developed in-house, keeping SWM in control of its own roadmap rather than dependent on external release cycles. And a dedicated orchestration layer connects everything, enabling seamless data exchange across the full energy trading process landscape.
Delivered as a Platform-as-a-Service, PowerTSM gives SWM's engineering teams development environments, APIs, databases, and frameworks out of the box, so they can focus on trading logic rather than infrastructure management. Applications deploy with minimal effort through streamlined pipelines; computing power and storage scale flexibly with trading volumes and data loads; and Volue manages hosting, updates, and security patching. A pay-as-you-go model removes large upfront investment and the financial risk that comes with it, while open APIs integrate cleanly with SWM's trading, scheduling, and reporting systems.
— Stefan Komornyik, VP Time Series Hub, Volue
With PowerTSM in place, SWM now works from a single source of truth for all of its energy time series data, underpinned by a cloud-native, API-driven architecture that runs consistently across every system. Trading, forecasting, scheduling and reporting now draw on one trusted view of the same data, and the architecture underneath is built to be reshaped as quickly as the market and the regulators demand.
— Martin Demker, Head of Trading Systems, Stadtwerke München
