DTWS: Vodafone wants IT standardization to facilitate partnerships and services

Scott Petty Chief Digital & IT Officer, Vodafone Technology, wants to see the level of IT standardization match that of networking as Vodafone’s IT and network teams collaborate more quickly to create new services that drive growth.

Petty is clear about why communications service providers (CSPs) cannot depend on driving greater operational efficiencies and need to be able to move faster on creating new products.

“We’re a strange industry,” he said. “Our customers use twice as much of our stuff every year, but they pay us less every year, so we need to create new products, services and capabilities to drive revenue growth [and] to continue to invest.”

IT & networking collaboration

Vodafone’s efforts to break down traditional silos and introduce new services are resulting in the company’s IT and network teams “working really closely together as we virtualize and move to cloud native in our core network, enabling 5G capabilities and developing new digital solutions that really require digital, IT and networks to work incredibly closely together,” said Petty. Vodafone has already clocked up some notable successes, including in the field of IoT. But it’s not enough.

There are “some really good products in consumer and business that have created some of those revenue sources of growth, but we need a lot more if we’re going to meet the targets that we think we can achieve,” said Petty.

Part of what is holding Vodafone back is a lack of interoperable IT systems. Petty said he wants to see the company’s IT suppliers do more to facilitate development of digital capabilities so that Vodafone can introduce more capabilities, more quickly. He stressed that a common framework and architecture are necessary to do this.

Betting on ODA

“We’d like to see from our external vendors’…adoption of the APIs and micro services that allow us to have the interoperability and to move at the scale and speed that we would like.” In particular, Petty would like to see even greater adoption of the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA).

“We’ve bet on TM Forum’s ODA as our reference architecture…and that really helps us manage our own source-code development, as well as the evolution,” said Petty. “Moving to an open architecture with common standards allows us to replace those big heavy-lifting lifecycle management projects with incremental advancements and...add new capabilities much, much more quickly.”

Partnerships are also an important part of Vodafone’s strategy, including with cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services.

“We really see hyperscalers as critical partners for us…both for consumers and our business customers.”

Here again, Vodafone wants IT standardization to make it easier to create new partnerships.

“The ability for our core vendor partners to also be able to leverage hyperscaler services is important to us… To be able to run core billing systems in cloud services is an important part of that evolution,” said Petty.

Insourcing skills

Shifts in how Vodafone develops products and services is also changing the company’s approach to hiring people with software engineering skills. Whereas previously Vodafone outsourced 75% of the skills it needed and insourced 25%, the goal over the next year is to insource 60% and outsource only 40%, explained Petty.

“Having our own software engineering skill sets is so critically important so that we can do that collaboration and joint product development together, enabling us to move at pace.”

Watch Scott's session during the Digital Transformation World Series on Making it happen: Why is tech the future for telco?