Proactive cloudification: Germany's Vodafone taps partner ecosystem for cloud transformation

CLOUD

Most enterprises worldwide have seen little choice outside of refactoring to stay competitive amidst supply chain disruptions and COVID-induced changes.

For Vodafone Kabel Deutschland GmbH, the largest cable television operator in Germany, that digital transformation was thorough, even leading to changing customer preferences as a result.

“Not only since the recent uncertainties, the telecom market is highly volatile, and there are few changes that Vodafone was facing in the last years,” said Christoph Scholtheis (pictured, middle), head of DevOps and infrastructure at Vodafone. “There are market changes caused by disruptions from technological advances in competitors or changing customer expectations who, for example, use more of the top services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.”

Scholtheis, alongside Emanuele Baldassarre (pictured, right), managing director at Accenture PLC; and Philip Schmökel (pictured, left), senior manager for technology at Accenture, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Vodafone tapped its partner ecosystem, which includes Accenture and Amazon Web Services Inc., to carry out proactive cloudification. (* Disclosure below.)

Constantly re-evaluating the transformation journey

Alongside AWS as the company’s cloud infrastructure provider, Vodafone has also leaned on Accenture as an integration partner for a technology transformation that is IT-driven. And a close-knit partnership with transparency, trust and top-level alignment of ideas has defined the effort thus far, according to Baldasarre.

“When you implement a program like this, you also need to couple the long-term vision of how you want to manage your customers and the new products you want to bring to the market with the long-term technology roadmap,” he explained.

Part of Vodafone’s holistic transformation program has been building a cloud integration platform using AWS. So far, it’s included considerable overhauls in areas such as API management, according to Schmökel.

“It’s rebuilding huge parts of the infrastructure of the business IT infrastructure on AWS,” he said. “What it gives you is the opportunity to build the API management layer on the API platform with standardized APIs right from the get-go.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent. Neither Accenture PLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE