The best companies obsess over customer experience, which can be a source of incredible competitive advantage. According to PwC, almost 75% of customers consider experience when making buying decisions, and one in three customers will leave a brand they love after a single bad experience
So how do you keep your customers happy when they’re spread over more than a dozen countries and accessing your services on more than 140 million devices? Especially when your team is just as dispersed.
If you’re Vodafone, you empower local software development teams to build the best apps they can—fast. That’s why the telecom giant streamlined its multinational engineering culture with a flexible approach and MongoDB Atlas, a fully managed multi-cloud developer data platform that handles the complexity of deploying and managing services.
Shifting the culture
In 2017, Vodafone shifted to an ambitious software delivery strategy, simplifying its IT core while accelerating the development speed of its distributed engineering teams. Powering that change is an approach Vodafone calls telco-as-a-service” (TaaS), which is designed to maximize the ease and effectiveness of the company’s internal software development experience. To this end, Vodafone uses pre-approved but flexible software architecture patterns that engineers can quickly employ through a self-service portal. These reusable platforms are intricately designed with essential security and privacy measures seamlessly integrated.
“TaaS changes the maturity and culture of our engineering,” said Ahmed Yehia Elsayed, Vodafone’s Global Digital Engineering Director and UK CIO. "We’re moving from a company that used to buy all its technology to a company that now builds more and more"
Elsayed manages developers across 12 European countries, leading teams that deliver cloud-native apps for the web, mobile apps, and chat support. In addition, they often use different systems and technologies.
In the new TaaS-centric arrangement, automated processes known as “pipelines” quickly move code additions from version control to production. MongoDB Atlas is a key component of the pipeline because it simplifies how engineers build with data; even disparate systems have a similar feel.
Today, Elsayed says, it takes us round ten days for the initial coding set-up. Moving forwards, with the self-service auto-provisioning that is pre-tested and security-approved, “our developers can be productive from day 1,” he says. “The impact is huge.”
Consolidate and move quickly
Vodafone’s acceleration plans used serverless computing;an application development and execution scheme that enables developers to build and run code without provisioning with managing servers or backend infrastructure.
Serverless architecture lets developers focus on writing the best code, while also reducing overhead and speeding time to market.
Indeed, switching to serverless computing can save significant time and money. Using the new serverless model, Vodafone engineers also rebuilt a logistics system which resulted in a significant financial reward. “Our cost to run the system decreased 50%,” Elsayed noted.
“Speed is the new money.”
During its transition to serverless computing, Vodafone needed to consolidate several legacy tech stacks, so it implemented a digital experience layer (DXL) that decouples backend legacy systems from its digital channels. DXL is an intermediary Kubernetes-based software layer that connects digital channels with customer relationship management (CRM) services.
Today, using MongoDB, the DXL business support system handles order management and a product catalog containing more than 500 products across 100 services throughout Turkey, Spain, and Albania. The DXL helped accelerate order fulfillment, tightened backend processes and reduced contact center activation complaints. "It’s a huge gain for our customers,” Elsayed said.
“MongoDB Atlas empowers organizations of all sizes to build faster and smarter while solving their data challenges,” said Boris Bialek, Field CTO at MongoDB. “Across the telecommunications industry, the pace of change is disrupting the status quo, but many enterprises face challenges with their digital transformation initiatives. MongoDB’s developer data platform ensures success while helping organizations like Vodafone reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and innovate with advanced technologies like AI.”
Happy developers
The many changes have improved morale among Vodafone developers, who are more productive and see their work integrated into products more quickly. “Imagine that you're a new developer here, and in just a few weeks on the job, you can celebrate having written code that is now a customer feature used by tens of millions of people,” Elsayed said. He noted that developers are in the mix and contributing immediately—a “day zero” contribution, as he calls it.
Vodafone’s new development speed and dexterity, driven by TaaS and empowered by MongoDB Atlas, is essential to the company's business velocity. “The past few years have been an incredible transformation,” Elsayed said. “But throughout it all, we have one goal: Let's bring our engineers and every line of code they write as close as possible to our customers and their needs. Everything we do targets that.”
To learn more about how telcos around the world rely on MongoDB to build innovative, cost-effective solutions, please visit MongoDB for Telecommunications.
