Complex Enterprise Cloud Platform Migration Leads to Accelerated Service Delivery for European Telco
WWT lab services allow telco to safely and quickly test cloud platform, avoiding millions in investment and potential lost revenue.
Challenge
Service providers across the globe are turning to enterprise solutions to help bolster future revenue generation and insulate themselves from stagnant consumer subscription growth rates.
But deploying and monetizing enterprise solutions is not as easy as it sounds. Service providers need to be agile and adaptive, incorporating new technologies quickly to build relevant services that are unique to the specific needs of various industry verticals.
One of Europe's largest telcos, which recently launched its own enterprise cloud platform to tap into the enterprise services market, leveraged World Wide Technology's extensive lab capabilities to quickly test and validate its platform prior to migrating it to the latest release of VMware's vCloud Suite.
The telco, which had already gone through multiple complex migrations, operated on a tight development cycle for the introduction of new functionalities on an eight- to 10-week product increment. Gaining quick virtual access to WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC) was critical to maintaining the leading edge of the platform.
The telco needed to:
- Test a new hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) reference architecture and its integration with the VMware hypervisor.
- Prove a next-generation Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) running on the HCI node as well as its integration with a Software-Defined Storage (SDS) vSAN layer.
- Validate the VMware NSX software-defined network (SDN) integration with Pivotal Container Services (PKS).
- And migrate the entire process at scale to VMware's latest release of the vCloud Suite.
Solution
Sourcing the necessary hardware and engineering power to perform the migration on its own would have cost the telco approximately $10 million over five years and would have put at risk as much as $15 million in service revenue.
WWT and VMware worked together to leverage the power of the ATC and quickly reproduced the telco's cloud environment to automate and de-risk the entire validation process, allowing for a flawless migration in just six months instead of the typical 18-month timeframe.
As the top innovation telco partner for European global service providers, WWT was able to quickly scale to meet demands of the telco when it needed to add additional sites and machines to the deployment. WWT also provided flexibility during the engagement by working through one of the telco's local partners to provide an added layer of data security.
Results
In gaining hands-on experience with the latest Dell PowerEdge 14 generation servers under both single and stretch cluster designs, the telco was able to gain knowledge for future migrations.
And with a newfound trust in its enterprise cloud platform, the telco customer was able to move its own legacy mainframe applications and data to the cloud architecture, resulting in a 60 percent IT cost reduction, and launch new enterprise products shortly thereafter.
WWT's state-of-the-art lab environment allowed VMware to focus on providing a valuable cloud stack to its end customer while helping the telco avoid a costly infrastructure and personnel expense to accelerate its time to revenue for bringing new services to market.
Check out this lab to learn more about VMware cloud solutions for service providers.