Case Study: Pizza Express achieves global expansion, operational efficiency and real-time customer insights with Microsoft Azure

Pizza Express feeds an international appetite for its restaurants with help from Microsoft cloud

Pizza Express, the 53‑year‑old UK pizza chain with over 570 restaurants worldwide, faced a technology and data challenge after a 2015 change in ownership: disparate legacy systems (including an old EPOS and locally hosted email), scattered third‑party data, slow manual reporting, and the need to scale securely for international growth while delivering a more customer‑centric experience.

The company adopted a cloud‑first strategy on Microsoft Azure and Office 365, migrated data into an Azure data warehouse with partner Altius, and built an Event Stream using Event Hub and Data Factory to create a single customer view. Combined with Power BI dashboards, these changes delivered near‑real‑time insights, automated reporting, targeted customer offers, greater operational agility, stronger GDPR‑grade security, and lower infrastructure overheads—freeing IT to focus on innovation and supporting faster global expansion.

Pizza Express