Vodafone has signed a six-year deal with Google Cloud (see Wireless Watch May 10) to develop an analytics system, which will crunch around 50 terabytes a day generated from 5,000 internal feeds. This is a large example of various such deals between mega-operators and cloud service providers.
There is often an enterprise software firm involved as well, with Germany’s SAP being a common choice as it often provides the financial, accounting, billing and revenue management systems that generate the data to be analyzed. In the Vodafone case, existing SAP software is being migrated to Google Cloud, including core workloads and corporate modules, creating digital twins of the operator’s global digital infrastructure and many internal support functions for modelling and simulating enhancements.
The immediate goal here is to reduce the cost of running these systems by around 30%, but the analytics platform will then serve as a basis both for exploiting the knowledge gained to offer consultancy to other enterprises and to guide development of 5G services through observation of customer trends.
As Johan Wibergh, Vodafone’s group CTO, indicated, the aim is to create a single integrated data platform called Nucleus that has access to all the company’s data, allowing software engineers to create and deploy AI-based models in the cloud. As part of Nucleus, a new system called Dynamo is being created to drive data throughout Vodafone to enable it to offer its customers new, personalized products and services across multiple markets, the company added.
Further insight was provided by Ignacio Garcia, CIO of corporate information systems at Vodafone, who told the online enterprise bulletin Diginomica that efforts to exploit the vast amounts of data, to generate valuable insights that would lead to service development, were being stymied by the dispersion of critical processes, making simulation and testing complex and expensive. He also noted that for a typical large telco, those SAP systems only account for about 10% of all the total data.
“In a telco, your billing system is in a separate system, your CRM is sitting in a different system, then you have all the network data,” said Garcia. “So, we created a super ambitious plan to unify and harmonize the data model of all of these systems, consolidate them and create one tooling that is our innovation machine, that can operate at speed and at scale.” That was Nucleus.
Garcia added that moving SAP to Google Cloud will allow Vodafone to consolidate all the company data in one place, an essential prelude to harnessing AI based analytics. It will no longer be necessary to pull huge volumes data across from dispersed systems.
“To copy all the data every time is not sustainable. You do not scale, you do not generate business value. Moving SAP to Google will give us the ability to inject all these engines natively,” Garcia added.
Vodafone’s rivals and peers have also been consolidating IT and data as part of broader strategies around edge compute and analytics. Telefónica sought to focus its corporate mind around an action plan announced in November 2019, aligning IT systems with key markets for both fixed and mobile services, notably Spain, Brazil, the UK and Germany. This involved the creation of two subsidiaries, Telefónica Tech and Telefónica Infra, to drive the project, as well as consolidation of all its Latin operations in a single unit.
Telefónica Tech then allied with Google to develop mobile edge computing in Spain and expanded an existing strategic partnership with Microsoft to deliver cloud services in the country. An interesting aspect of this alignment behind key markets then came into play as Telefónica reached out to other telcos that were sometimes competitors with the aim of creating a “federation of interconnected operators” supporting edge services. Deutsche Telekom was the first partner for trials of edge nodes connected in Germany and Spain.
This also accords with DT’s strategic repositioning around cloud services, announced in February 2021. As part of this, DT’s IT services subsidiary T-Systems extended existing partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. T-Systems said it was investing over €100m in training its cloud team and expanding its Open Telekom Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), unveiled in 2016.
“Everything is becoming cloud,” said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of T-Systems, when announcing the cloud services realignment. “The trick is no longer to operate data centers, but to map work processes intelligently in highly automated infrastructures, which we call cloud computing. We are consistently aligning our company to this.”
This is quite like Vodafone’s approach, but more customer facing at this stage. Enterprise customers are now offered a cloud solution package based on Microsoft Azure from a single source with a single invoice. Alternatively, they can be assisted in migration to the cloud on AWS infrastructure or Google Cloud as DT seeks to become a provider of multi-cloud services.
DT is the largest shareholder in T-Mobile USA with 43%, which has also been modernizing its infrastructure to support customer facing applications, in this case taking the specific application of supporting customer requests via social media as a focal point for consolidation. The operator migrated applications from on-premises facilities to containers in the cloud to improve performance and accelerate the associated application deployment, moving on from social media to other customer related processes.
Among other US operators, AT&T was one of the first to consolidate critical enterprise systems in the cloud during 2018, bringing together around 2,000 Oracle databases, many of which held customer data subject to strict regulations, as well as providing the basis for service improvement.
At the same time, AT&T deployed the combination of NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) as part of a separation of control from underlying forwarding or switching processes, enabling smoother scaling and more efficient deployment of new services. This provided a foundation for a global IoT service combining AT&T’s cellular network with Microsoft Azure Sphere, offering what the operator claimed was secure and effortless IoT deployment worldwide. That may be a slight exaggeration but exemplifies the process of building out from internal infrastructure modernization and consolidation to deploy new potentially revenue-generating customer services.