TotalEnergies is a global energy company producing and supplying oil, biofuels, natural and green gases, and electricity from renewable sources. It generates annual revenue of approximately €217 billion, thanks to more than 100,000 employees, 300 industrial sites, 400 wind/solar power plant sites, nearly 165,000 service stations, and 73,000 charging points for electric vehicles. The group’s objective is to rank among the world’s five largest producers of renewable energy. In 2024, it already had more than 24 gigawatts of gross renewable electricity production capacity. It hopes to continue on this road and reach net electricity production of more than 100 terawatt-hours by 2030.
The group has placed sustainable development at the heart of its strategy and operations, with the dual goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and providing accessible energy to the huge number of people around the world who lack it. Modern IT is at the heart of the transition at TotalEnergies, whose ambitious plans require increasing amounts of data, computing, cybersecurity, and flexibility while remaining cost effective.
Standardizing the information system
With an IT budget of €1.4 billion, TotalEnergies already has significant computing power. Its architecture includes 14,000 servers and a next-generation supercomputer called Pangea4, which processes 37,000 TB of data. Initially developed to support TotalEnergies’s exploration and production activities, Pangea is now open to all activities, which serves the company’s energy transition.
The group has also expanded its IT operations through the acquisition of companies. “Over the years, we had to bring these businesses together, standardize all their information systems, and automate numerous processes,” explained Alexandre Appert, Chief Technical Officer of TotalEnergies. The group also had to consider other issues, such as cybersecurity. In fact, the group faces 16 million attacks per year, and 3,000 of them require intervention, so 6% of the IT budget is dedicated to this challenge.
Finally, TotalEnergies had to adapt to producing and managing new energy sources, such as wind and solar power, adding IT coverage to many new sites. “We were used to managing large IT sites that took several years to build and implement,” said Arnaud de Almeida, Head of Company Data Architecture at TotalEnergies. “And we had the time. Today, we are faced with much smaller but more numerous sites.” The company easily addressed this challenge by storing all the previously distributed data in a MongoDB environment for complete processing. “This gives us much greater agility and helps us integrate the sites quickly,” said de Almeida.
Transforming with Move2Cloud
In addition to these developments, the company’s IT team is also being fully centralized in its “Move2Cloud” transformation program. The group has almost reached its target of 60% cloud migration, with 400 out of 900 applications already migrated. The rest will remain on premises.
The support of the company’s key decision-makers greatly facilitated this operation, bringing more agility and innovation to the business. For example, as a result of the migration, TotalEnergies only required a few days to display a fuel price of €1.99 at all its service stations during the 2024 energy crisis, instead of the several months it would have taken to make such a widespread change to how information was displayed in each location previously.
Delivering and liberating data
The move to the cloud was also an opportunity for the group to transform its data management, moving away from an environment that required all applications to access information stored in a siloed database. “We chose to completely open up access to [data], thanks to the solutions provided by the cloud, whether it be the data lake, structured data, or unstructured data with MongoDB,” explained Appert. New cross-functional uses required access to multiple databases, making it essential to eliminate silos. As a result, the company has trained its employees—800 people as of April 2024—on cloud technologies and moved to support both cloud and on-premises environments with dedicated teams.
As part of its holistic transformation, TotalEnergies implemented cloud-based FinOps—a financial management practice that involves cross-functional teams in a collaborative effort to control costs. The company knew that in a new environment, cost tracking must be executed well and with real commitment from application and business teams. Now the company’s business teams have better visibility into their data sources and can take direct ownership of them, benefiting from easier access and reduced data duplication.
Placing MongoDB at the center of technological innovation
According to de Almeida, MongoDB was the obvious choice for the IT foundation because it accepts multiple data types, enables multi-cloud architectures, and uses no-code/low-code to simplify application development. It also supports time series technology, which uses optimizes a time series database to process measurements and events that are tracked, monitored, sampled, and aggregated over time. Among other results, TotalEnergies can now improve banking fraud detection.
Facing the next challenge: AI
”While TotalEnergies has a wealth of data, many pockets of value remain untapped,” said Appert. AI represents a real opportunity for skills development. The group is already using AI for predictive maintenance, graphical simulation, and even methane detection at certain industrial sites. On the user side, the company has also deployed an AI assistant, to 30,000 employees, who use it daily—further accelerating development on MongoDB by streamlining coding, queries, and automation.
Conclusion
While the energy sector is undergoing rapid change, modern IT is a key player in ensuring efficiency, security, and sustainability. By digitally transforming on MongoDB, TotalEnergies can use the full capabilities of the cloud and AI. In fact, the group is currently working on building its first solution on its new IT environment: With AI and MongoDB as the foundations, the new solution, SafeWorld, will protect employees and partners by detecting unsafe conditions on work sites.
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