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Automation and Agile drive transformation at PCCW Global

Paul Gampe, PCCW Global's Chief Technology Officer, reveals the biggest wins the company has achieved so far in their digital transformation: automation and agile.

Michelle Howard
11 Mar 2021
Automation and Agile drive transformation at PCCW Global

Automation and Agile drive transformation at PCCW Global

Paul Gampe, Chief Technology Officer, PCCW Global
Paul Gampe, PCCW Global's Chief Technology Officer, reveals the biggest wins the company has achieved so far in their digital transformation: automation and agile.
How does your IT strategy enable your organizations enterprise-wide business transformation?

Since joining PCCW Global as part of the Console Connect acquisition, I’ve have a leadership role across several domains with a remit to develop software applications with a focus on self-service application. A core part of our strategy is to combine our network and our software into a single unified technical capability. This strategy aims to make our back-end capabilities immediately accessible to our users on the front-end. To help drive that strategy, we needed a common language and framework; a way for the disparate communities of software developers and IP engineering teams to be able to understand each other.

With the support of the executive leadership of PCCW Global, we made a decision in early 2018 to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe is a structured roadmap, and with that we have identified value streams and formatted agile release trains (agile team-of-teams). Since 2018 we’ve been on a journey of continuously increasing the number of our colleagues who have embraced that agile mindset.

What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving your technology transformation?

The biggest challenge we’ve faced so far was recreating the willingness and the desire to adopt new ways of working within a very successful company with a well-established operating model to. When something works well there’s often no urgency for change, so part of the challenge was to create that desire to want to embrace new ways of working. That has been very successful.

Secondly, identifying a successful and cost-effective strategy to transition legacy infrastructure into modern architecture so that we so that we go from a cost centre to a revenue centre. It’s quite deliberate that I have a Chief Technology Officer title rather than a Chief Information Officer title; technology is seen as core to our future as a company.

What’s the biggest win you’ve achieved so far?

Automation. The reasons behind PCCW Global’s acquisition of Console Connect was two-fold – firstly a genuine belief that the future of our industry will be based on self-service applications and automation and secondly, to infuse that element of software DNA and agile mindset into the organization. Our primary achievement over the last 18 months, apart from the success of training the number of colleagues that we’ve trained in agile ways of working, is the automation we’ve achieved with the Console Connect platform. Within 90 days of acquisition, the platform was automating layer 2 services on the PCCW Global network.

What’s compelling is that combination of our large-scale software automation capability, from one of the largest networks in the world, combined with our users’ ability to provision connectivity from any data centre to any data centre in over 100 countries around the world; to orchestrate connectivity from one user to another on the platform seamlessly and fully automatically; and to provision connectivity to Amazon, Azure, Google, Alibaba, Tencent and IBM, fully automated in minutes. We think we’re the largest network in the world to provide that level of automation.

What’s the next big idea you’re working on?

We have just released the ability to offer general internet access to any user of our platform. The view of connectivity as a complex experience is changing, and we now have thousands of users who realize you can now connect in seconds – and they want to be able to do everything from that single port on the platform. So we have those three use cases we discussed previously – connectivity to self, others and the cloud – and we are in a position to offer general internet access from that single port. So we can provide a single gateway to all of your connectivity needs. We’re really excited about this new capability.

In terms of logical progression, where the industry is going is towards 5G network slicing and Edge compute capability; we have the technical capability coming with 5G network slicing. We achieved a proof of concept earlier in the year where we were able to issue an IoT SIM card and through our partners orchestrate the connectivity from that IoT device to Console Connect and onto a private network then onto a public cloud – we think that is the use case that the whole IoT industry is going to need. It brings together our strength and experience in mobility and voice coupled with the strength of IP engineering, and our ability to orchestrate that connectivity through Console Connect. Essentially you can slice an IoT device and connect it to any network that it needs via an API.

What are your three internal priorities for the rest of the year and why? For example: technology changes, network upgrades, launching new platforms, upskilling staff, etc.

The first priority that we have is continuing to educate the industry about our vision for the future of connectivity – from manual ordering and manual provisioning to full automation via API integration. As on-demand transactions grow, the industry will move from low volume, high value annual contracts to remarkably high volumes. Settlement then becomes an issue, so we’ve done a lot of work with a few innovative start-ups on integrating distributed ledger technology into our infrastructure so that we can go from quote, order, provision and settle – within minutes. It’s really important for us to continue to work with TM Forum and other standards organizations as the value of the distributed ledger will increase by the number of participants. My primary objective is to educate the industry and try to coalesce support around the idea of distributed ledger.

Secondly, we continue to identify the internal colleagues who are able to perform part of that value stream as we continue to look at ways of delivering value to our users, i.e. who are the people inside our organization that would benefit from being part of our agile transformation.

Lastly, managing that transition within that cost envelope, whether we’re talking about IT costs or staff costs; ensuring that we’re making a very measured and stable transition in terms of revenue and EBITDA whilst continuing to evolve (and involve) our colleagues and our infrastructure.

How has TM Forum helped you achieved your objectives?

We’ve used the TM Forum body of knowledge for a lot of the integrations that we have with our partners associated with quoting and issue resolution – there are some partners with whom we do deep API integrations within those areas. For some of the POC works that we’ve undertaken involving Blockchain and distributed ledger technology settlements, we’ve also traditionally worked with and included MEF.

Read our full series of interviews with digital transformation leaders from around the world, and learn more about their stories and experiences.