Vodafone and Google Cloud to Create ‘Industry-First’ Unified Data Platform
- Vodafone and Google Cloud have signed a six-year agreement to create a big data platform that will help the carrier deliver a more personalized service to businesses and consumers around the world
- Vodafone will host its SAP environment and all Big Data and Business Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud
In the latest trend of convergence between the telecommunications sector and Silicon Valley, telecommunications network giant Vodafone has embarked on a multi-year project with Google, which will see the first migrate all its systems and data to Google Cloud. The goal of the collaboration is to create an integrated data platform called Nucleus, a unified access platform all company data.
Nucleus will host a new system, Dynamo, to âmanage data in Vodafone to enable it to deliver new personalized products and services to customers more quickly in multiple marketsâ, according to Vodafone. In short, the platform will support new digital products and services for customers, as well as its distributed systems.
The company said Dynamo would allow it to scale new connectivity services for homes and businesses through the release of smart grid features, such as providing a sudden and additional boost in broadband speed. If the platform is successful, it would be a further surge for the public cloud computing market, which is expected to grow 23.1% to US $ 332.3 billion (£ 239.3 billion) in 2021. , according to research firm Gartner.
Vodafone currently operates in 22 countries, has partner networks in 48 other countries and brings in more than 44 billion euros per year. That said, given how critical data is to business success – both in terms of improving operations and creating new business models for customers – it’s time for Vodafone to take such a step. decision. The agreement is expected to last six years and will involve collaboration of up to 1,000 employees of mobile operator Vodafone and tech giant Google, spread across the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The internal data platform
Both parties claim that Nucleus and Dynamo are industry firsts and will be built in-house on their own. teams of specialists elected in the two firms. Capable of processing around 50 terabytes of data per day – the equivalent of 25,000 hours of HD film (and more and more) – Nucleus and Dynamo appear to be the first in the telecommunications space. At least such a significant migration on such a scale within the telecoms scene.
Johan Wibergh, Technical Director of Vodafone, said: âVodafone is laying the foundations for a digital future. We have vast amounts of data that, when handled securely and made available across our entire footprint, through the collective power of Vodafone and the engineering expertise of Google Cloud, will transform our services. , to our customers and governments, and the societies where they live and serve.
Vodafone has identified more than 700 use cases to quickly deliver new products and services to its markets to support evidence-based decisions, reduce costs, eliminate duplication of data sources, and simplify and centralize operations. The speed and ease with which Vodafone operating companies in multiple countries can access its data analytics, intelligence and machine learning capabilities will also be dramatically improved.
According to reports, Nucleus is located in Google Cloud and has three basic components. First of all, there is the Neuron platform which hosts all the data. Dynamo is responsible for overseeing data flows and migrations to Neuron. And third, Vodafone is also creating a common data model. The move from SAP to Google Cloud will allow Vodafone to consolidate all of its business data in one place and run new models faster.
Ignacio Garcia, CIO of Vodafone’s enterprise information system, said they have completed the Neuron program they started two years ago, migrating all the big data platforms they have at Cloudera to Google. . âWe’re talking about 70 petabytes of data in Google Cloud, on a diagram. We have a way of moving the data, we have a way of doing anonymization, we have a way of doing encryption, we have a way of doing markup, and we have a data model. “
What happens next is the second big program, Nucleus, which involves moving every Vodafone data warehouse in the company to Google Cloud. âI’m talking about more than 150 systems, that’s the scale. Why? My ambition is to have only two copies of the data in the future – one in the source system and one in Google Cloud. This is not the case today. This means that we will have only one version of the truth. Right now you have to reconcile between the different data warehouses, âGarcia said.
So far Vodafone is keeping Portugal alive, currently doing Hungary and will be followed by UK which will be a three year program. Vodafone will move its entire SAP environment to Google Cloud, including core SAP workloads and enterprise SAP modules such as SAP Central Finance. As part of their collaborative work, Vodafone and Google Cloud will also explore opportunities for consulting services, offered jointly with their partners or independently, to other organizations and multinational companies.