Vodafone India Limited has struck a data transformation deal with IBM to improve its customer experience, the company announced on Tuesday.
VIL has announced a partnership with IBM by selecting the latter’s open source at scale across the enterprise by implementing the Big Data Platform on open-source Hadoop framework.
As VI’s (formerly Vodafone Idea) strategic technology partner, IBM is leading the end-to-end implementation and management of the platform.
As a part of the implementation, IBM is responsible for program management, consulting, system integration, infrastructure services, application operations, and maintenance support. Additionally, IBM is helping in enhancing network security. The IBM team’s expertise is integral to supporting VI to achieve a reduction in the overall cost of data analytics. The insights from advanced data mining empower employees and partners in faster decision making and elevating the omnichannel, digital-first experience, for end customers. The implementation will result in 40 per cent cost reduction in terms of analytics IT landscape and 60 per cent reduction in operational complexity, IBM added.
The implementation builds on IBM’s existing work to advance VIL’s hybrid cloud transformation using open technologies. This includes an agreement earlier this year to deliver its Open Universal Cloud with IBM and Red Hat to accelerate network and IT modernisation. IBM has been a strategic IT partner to Vodafone Idea for more than a decade.
With the world’s largest IT and network integration, Vodafone Idea has a need for large scale data transformation with a focus on architecture modernisation, open-source adoption and using predictive analytics for data modernisation. By partnering on this implementation, IBM is helping VIL transform the way data is optimised and delivered to partners, employees and internal systems. Fragmented, siloed data can now be streamlined for seamless data availability.
VIL will also be able to combine insights from the Big Data Platform and better leverage cloud-native technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance revenues, reduce costs and elevate customer experiences.
Currently, insights derived from the data are leveraged for management dashboards, campaign management, network analytics, usage traffic analysis, product analysis, amongst others.
“With the successful completion of the world’s largest integration in record time, we have embarked on a journey equipped with augmented data insights to help millions of our customers with customised and faster service launches,” said Vishant Vora, chief technology officer, VIL. “Along with IBM we have implemented many first-of-kind projects and the big data and analytics engagement is one such initiative. The open-source approach has helped us in modernising infrastructure and network experience, helping our people and partners in quicker business decision making. The power of data will help transform our cloud and AI journey in the future.”
“VIL is at the forefront of adopting open technologies helping shape the telecom landscape in India. The modernised and future-ready data platform is helping VIL get daily actionable insights to make strategic and operational level decisions effectively,” said Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia. “IBM and VIL team worked together in challenging times of Covid-19 lockdown to seamlessly execute a complex and enterprise-wide deployment remotely.”
