As Sunfire scales its industrial green hydrogen production, ensuring a stable, secure, and scalable IT environment has become essential to support its growth.
In this interview, Heiko Göllner, IT Director at Sunfire, shares how this company partnered with Axians to modernize its IT landscape through cloud-based infrastructure and managed services. By leveraging Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and a unified digital workplace approach, Sunfire now has a more resilient, efficient digital foundation, enabling its teams to collaborate seamlessly and focus on strategic priorities.
Can you briefly introduce Sunfire, what the company does, the markets it serves, and how IT supports your business operations?
Sunfire is a German clean tech company that develops and manufactures pressurized alkaline and high temperature SOEC electrolyzers for industrial green hydrogen production.
The company serves energy intensive industries such as chemicals, steel, fuels, and mobility, and is currently scaling toward mass production of alkaline electrolyzers up to 50 MW. IT supports Sunfire by enabling secure, cloud-based collaboration, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring stable digital operations across engineering, production, and field services.
What were the main challenges Sunfire faced when managing and operating the IT environment before adopting cloud-based managed services?
Before adopting cloud based managed services, Sunfire faced a rapidly growing and increasingly complex IT landscape that was difficult to scale and secure with limited internal resources.
The company struggled with fragmented infrastructure, inconsistent endpoint management, and a high operational workload that slowed down IT modernization. In addition, ensuring security, compliance (NIS2), and stable operations across multiple locations and a fast-growing workforce became increasingly challenging without standardized cloud platforms and centralized management.
What were the key reasons Sunfire chose Axians to manage the Azure infrastructure, Microsoft 365 collaboration platform, and the virtual desktop environment?
Sunfire selected Axians because they offered deep expertise in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and virtual desktop environments, combined with a mature managed services approach tailored to fast growing industrial companies.
Axians convinced us with their security focused operational model, standardized service processes, and the ability to scale quickly with our rapid organizational growth.
How has the unified end-user helpdesk and device management with Microsoft Intune improved the experience for Sunfire’s employees and IT operations?
The unified helpdesk and Microsoft Intune–based device management have improved employee experience by standardizing device setups, increasing security, and streamlining onboarding. Centralized endpoint management has reduced configuration errors and improved policy consistency across all locations.
However, we are not yet fully satisfied with the current first level support, as we still lack clearly defined solution paths and more structured resolution scenarios. For IT, the setup has nonetheless reduced operational workload and increased transparency, allowing the team to shift more focus toward strategic initiatives.
How have Axians’ cloud-based infrastructure and managed services helped Sunfire gain flexibility and focus more on its core business activities?
Axians’ cloud-based infrastructure and managed services have provided Sunfire with a stable and scalable technical foundation, supported by strong implementation skills and reliable operational expertise. Their managed services reduce the burden of day-to-day platform operations, allowing our internal IT team to redirect capacity toward long standing internal challenges and backlog items that previously could not be addressed due to resource constraints.
Instead of being tied up with maintenance and troubleshooting, we can now focus more on security, production critical IT/OT topics, and the strategic development of Sunfire’s digital landscape.