Q&A with Telecom Italia's Raimondo Zizza: How TIM made its IT architecture future-proof

More than a year ago, Telecom Italia (TIM) started a thorough modernization of its architecture by using a modern, cloud-native architecture and a flexible and modular commerce solution on top of existing legacy applications. They implemented a completely open architecture based on microservices that would allow a multi-channel strategy with an aggressive time to market.

The company chose to maintain a gradual approach to this modernization to keep business levels steady. Although this was a lengthy process, TIM was confident that it would have a positive effect on the business, fast.

We sat down with TIM CIO Raimondo Zizza, who led the initiative, to take an in-depth look at the innovative, highly effective approach the company took to transforming its architecture. Zizza has worked in the telecommunications industry for nearly 30 years in procurement, transformation and implementation of new technologies throughout telco organizations including TIM, TIM Brazil and Telecom Argentina.

Zizza explained how software and services provider Amdocs helped TIM move towards its transformation goals and subsequent commercial goals of meeting dynamic customer demands with new and innovative offers and promotions.

What is TIM’s market vision?

Our goal is to deliver the best digital experience to all our customers, made possible by TIM’s best-in-class infrastructures and technologies.

You have an extensive telecoms background. How is this digital transformation project different from projects you’ve worked on previously?

This approach adopted, for the first time, an Agile scrum methodology which leverages the interaction between our IT department and any other company departments interested in launching a new service. In general, we are delivering this project in DevOps mode – which means short iterations and short release cadences of new functionality to the customer.

To achieve this, TIM moved from a lengthy IT-based process relying on monolithic applications to an innovative microservices architecture which guarantees great performance in terms of speed, allowing us to react and manage high peaks of requests. This architecture also allows us to easily add or remove functionalities where needed.

This data-oriented IT architecture is future-proof, agile, flexible, scalable and ‘open’ to the digital ecosystem.

Furthermore, this transformation entailed a major culture shift, requiring employee reskilling and a change of mindset towards digital and Agile ways of working. We believe that this project will put TIM in a leading position in terms of technologies and our ability to meet customers’ needs – now and in the future.

What were some of your guiding principles for this project?

The main principle guiding this project is the optimization of the relationship with TIM’s customers and the prompt response to their changing needs and demands.

How is Amdocs supporting and empowering you to achieve this vision?

Although network operators usually take a network-centric approach, we are decoupling the commercial layer from the network layer to commercialize them independently.

Amdocs helped us build a commerce catalog and order capture on top of our existing stack to empower business users, allowing them to create unique and complex offers and promotions quickly and easily to help our organization meet the changing needs of our customers much more efficiently. This omnichannel experience was key to increasing online sales, modernizing customer engagement, and enabling agile marketing with a business user designed catalog.

What value has come out of the transformation?

The adoption of this new solution is already delivering important results in terms of the back-office burden and quality of market response. A successful example is the commercial fiber offer over the web launched in early 2019 which registered a daily 4% increase in sales compared to other channels. This result is close to that of the most important players in the market such as Amazon.

Why are microservices so necessary for companies looking to digitally transform? And why was it necessary for you?

We use microservices to enable a fast response to changing customer needs and to guarantee automatic scale-up. All the collected data and information is managed by microservices. We organize and manage the granularity in the data in a way that helps us understand the bigger issues in the business.

Our architecture is completely based on platform as a service, so we can automatically scale-up and scale-down as necessary, which means better agility, flexibility and of course, scalability to meet the changing peaks in consumer demands.

For example, some weeks ago TIM’s marketing department launched a campaign, and the platform allowed us to quickly scale up, obtaining a good performance without directly managing the server in a physical environment.

TIM deemed it necessary to adopt the microservices solutions to respond to customer behaviors which are not always predictable and are typical of web contexts, such as viral phenomena or massive adhesions to last minute offers.

Do you have any transformation plans for the future?

We intend to extend this approach from our retail customers to our business customers. Our aim is to move the whole company to this new architecture within the next two years. This architecture is future-proof and it is identical to what behind the 5G core network. The deployment of 5G technology will, of course, boost the process further.

The architecture based on microservices will allow us to offer a completely new and tailor-made catalog. We have more than 2,000 offerings just in the mobile market.

This will also help reduce time to market helping us launch new services very quickly. We are talking in terms of days rather than months as is the norm today.

Sponsored by: Amdocs