Vodafone Group has signed a six-year deal with Google Cloud, which will see the companies collaborate to develop a new analytics system, with up to 1,000 staff from both firms due to work on the project.
This system will allow the operator to move and process “huge volumes of data globally from multiple systems into the cloud”, it said, targeting volumes of 5,000 data feeds per day, or about 50 terabytes per day “and growing”.
The new co-developed system will have two parts – an integrated data platform called Nucleus, based on hybrid cloud technology, and a distribution engine called Dynamo, which will pull data from various sources and push key information back to end points to be used. Nucleus will be enabled by Neuron, a data ocean for analytics, which Vodafone and Google designed in 2019.
Vodafone operating companies in multiple countries will be able to access the data analytics and machine learning capabilities for data-driven insights.
Johan Wibergh, Vodafone’s group CTO, said in a statement: “We have vast amounts of data which, when securely processed and made available across our footprint using the collective power of Vodafone and Google Cloud’s engineering expertise will transform our services to our customers and governments and the societies where they live and serve.”
Vodafone said Nucleus and Dynamo will enable improved delivery of mobile and fixed connectivity and TV content, with new capabilities such as hyper-personalized rewards or data rates. It has identified more than 700 use cases for the new system, some related to delivering new or improved services, some to operational efficiencies such as predictive maintenance or dynamic changes in capacity for changing traffic requirements.
As part of the project, Vodafone will migrate its whole SAP IT software environment to Google Cloud, including core workloads and corporate modules, and create digital twins of its global digital infrastructure and many of its internal support functions.
The partners are also interested in monetizing the collaboration by providing consultancy services and blueprints to other multinational organizations.
Vodafone first teamed up with Google for analytics in late 2019, in a project to replace its own on-premise data platform that ran on 600 physical servers and the open source framework Hadoop.
Vodafone believes the new platform will reduce the cost of running some systems by 20% to 40%.