Ambitious Cloud-First Transformation Program for T-Mobile Netherlands

Leveraging public cloud, vertical sourcing, DevOps, and fully automated monitoring, Wipro helped T-Mobile optimize performance while reducing IT spend by 50%.

Challenges

T-Mobile Netherlands provides mobile, fixed-line, and MVNO services to 6.9 million customers, for a total annual revenue of approximately $1.9 billion.

The company was running its entire IT from servers hosted in Athens, Greece, and multiple data centers in the Netherlands, including in city center like a few in The Hague, then Rotterdam and so on. This setup caused a list of challenges:

Cost

Multiple data centers and legacy platforms are expensive to maintain and do not allow for much automation or standardization.

Compliance

Old infrastructure is not compliant with the latest security requirements.

Organization

T-Mobile did not have vertical ownership of applications/workloads, leading to technical debt.

Scale

The distributed, on-prem setup wasn’t scalable, limiting T-Mobile’s ability to scale operations as needed.

Agility

Legacy infrastructure based on data centers made it difficult to adapt to changing demands. 

Solution

For the first step in its modernization initiative, T-Mobile wanted to move its entire IT to the cloud, with native cloud adoption wherever possible to enable full DevOps and automation.

Over a fifteen-month period, Wipro planned to transition around sixty-five applications to AWS cloud, each with an average of four environments: dev, agile, staging, production. We also planned to incorporate full-scale security, CI/CD, DevOps, and test automation.

Because almost all applications were running on legacy platforms like AIX or Solaris, Wipro implemented multiple custom migration approaches based on platform, database, and application version, as well as differential database migration, AWS Datasync, Rsync, and SAP Migration Utility. Wherever possible, Wipro targeted RDS in AWS and native solutions like AWS SeS/Aurora DBs.

Business impact

The transformation has improved all business lines including T-Mobile, Tele2, BEN, and allowed T-Mobile to decommission old infrastructure located in data centers across Athens and various parts of Netherlands.

Wipro implemented complete vertical ownership (vertical sourcing) of the various applications and enabled DevOps where possible. Greater application observability increased productivity and reduced issue resolution time.

• CI/CD and automated testing enabled higher quality and more secure code delivery for production while keeping all environments in sync.
• Audit delivery was ensured from development stream perspective into production.
• Functional UI test case automation resulted in faster regression testing.
• Transitioning key applications like Tibco, SAP and order management to the cloud improved performance and experience in customer channels and shops.

Together, these results will help to reduce IT spend by 50%.