T-Mobile Achieves Cost Savings, Faster Time-to-Market and Better Code through CI/CD

Ambition

For T-Mobile, a leading European telecommunications company with approximately seven million mobile subscribers, the ability to develop and deploy new releases of legacy applications such as Tibco, BSCS Billing, and Informatica is critical to ensuring good customer experiences. T-Mobile needed to ensure seamless integration, accelerate time to market, and reduce IT and operational costs, which led to the decision to modernize its entire application landscape and adopt a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) approach. T-Mobile chose Wipro as its partner for this broad transformation program.

Action

The effort began with a deep-dive analysis of T-Mobile’s existing application landscape to identify opportunities for automation, which would reduce manual efforts and errors. Wipro developed multiple fully integrated and customized CI/CD pipelines, each of them evaluated for code quality, code security, and artifact storage (with audit trail). In total, Wipro delivered eight fully automated CI/CD pipelines, all with integrated scripts for elastic monitoring of disablement/enablement on server restarts. This facilitated automated deployments – including accelerating time to market and improving quality – across varied technologies (PL/SQL, Shell, PHP, Java and Tibco) using open-source tools for build, test and release activities.

The new pipeline was integrated with an observability platform that included an intuitive elastic dashboard. This centralized, automated system now provides real-time monitoring of each middleware component and takes proactive corrective actions that reduce the number of IT incidents. It also enables auto-ticketing and generates alerts about infrastructure capacity, pipeline performance and development status.

The engagement also involved moving applications to a new cloud infrastructure. We delivered strong security and elastic stack observability for T-Mobile’s open-source automation server and enabled pipeline status monitoring. Finally, Wipro helped T-Mobile adopt a DevOps approach to ensure clear ownership of responsibilities and establish well-defined processes.

Ambitions Realized

Thanks to this initiative, T-Mobile is now able to automate a substantial part of its release and deployment process, which has accelerated time-to-market and reduced IT development and maintenance costs. Infrastructure expenses have also been lowered because of the move to the cloud. The overall effort also resulted in higher quality releases of software updates; in fact, code quality standards improved by about 50%. With the new approach, deployable artifacts are secure and immutable from development through production, which maintains the integrity of each release.

At a more granular level, T-Mobile has benefited from a reduction in the number of incidents and an improvement in mean time to recovery (MTTR), thanks to centralized and transparent dashboards that make it easy to see and understand changes going to production, quality reports, secure and immutable artifacts, test results, and audit trails. Over the course of 10 releases, the company identified and fixed more than 70 security issues prior to release.

To continue its transformation, the company is considering moving to a digital ops or no-ops model to remove any manual interventions throughout the releases.