Case Study: Itron cuts release cycles from months to weeks and reduces licensing costs by 25% with Microsoft Azure

Digital transformation in DevOps is a “game-changer”

Itron, a global leader in utility technology serving more than 8,000 utilities worldwide, faced a fragmented R&D landscape after years of acquisitions: nearly 100 customer-facing platforms, multiple languages and databases, and development spread across 14 locations. That autonomy hurt productivity, quality, security, visibility, and time-to-market as Itron shifted toward cloud-based managed services and Smart City opportunities, prompting a companywide digital transformation and DevOps initiative.

Itron standardized on Microsoft Azure for delivery and migrated about 1,600 users to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in phases, adopting unified processes, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Power BI-driven dashboards. The result: release cycles shrank to three-week sprints, testing times fell by about 80% (from as much as 10 weeks to ~2 weeks), licensing costs dropped at least 25%, and the company now has far greater visibility, agility, and faster time-to-market.

Itron

Greg Richards

Vice President, DevOps