Telefónica Colombia uses open source solutions to improve time to market and operational efficiency

Telefónica Colombia

Telefónica Colombia was looking for a trusted partner to provide assistance and support on its digital transformation journey. High licensing costs from proprietary vendors, solutions that were quickly becoming obsolete, and a long and tedious application and development process prevented Telefónica from meeting customer needs in a timely manner. They chose Red Hat to help work out how to achieve this in the face of tightening budgets.

Communications provider Telefónica is a major contributor to Colombia’s digital economy. Under the Movistar brand, Telefónica provides landline and mobile phone services, broadband and fiber-optic services, pay-per-view TV, and a full range of digital solutions for businesses. It relies on Red Hat’s expertise and technologies to deliver fast, high-quality services to its 21 million customers across Latin America.

2022 Red Hat Innovation Awards winner

Telefónica launched its internal project, TFL Integration Telefónica, to address some significant challenges. It needed to reduce operational costs over time, improve performance in its overall processes, and most importantly, identify the technologies that would help them accomplish these goals.

The business’s existing integration platform was based on Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. Telefónica quickly realized that the key challenge would be migrating the services it needed without also migrating the system’s problematic elements. It needed a new version of its current integration platform which allowed for a fast, agile response to the business’ evolving requirements.

Telefónica needed a holistic solution that would reduce its licensing costs and solve various obsolescence-related issues. It was also looking to improve operational performance in the areas of architecture, app design and development, testing and quality control, and deployment.

First, Telefónica worked with Red Hat to help define its container adoption journey. This would be used as the basis for selective migration of some mobile application-specific functions to a Red Hat solution set comprising Red Hat^Ⓡ OpenShift^Ⓡ Container Platform, and Red Hat 3scale API Management.

Telefónica and Red Hat worked together to define the metrics that would establish a service baseline before setting out a scrum-based work schedule. A series of workshops then established the necessary frames of reference, tools, and capacity requirements, and assessed how these related to the project’s primary objectives. The KPIs focused on reducing the time taken to complete six specific process areas: development cycle, deployment, application patching, preventive maintenance, application rollback, and platform scaling and growth.

Telefónica’s engineers are now able to demonstrate measurable improvements around essential services, like Telefónica’s core mobile app. Red Hat helped to transform the design, build, testing, and delivery of high-value digital solutions for several teams, including architecture, development, security, and operations. Now, they’re faster, more efficient, effective, and less costly, ultimately improving customer experience.

Software and Services

• Red Hat® OpenShift®
• Red Hat 3scale API Management
• Red Hat Consulting
• Red Hat training and certification

All KPIs showed substantial improvements – in some cases more than 90%. Service deployment time has been cut from nearly one hour to just over two minutes while patching cycle times were reduced from two weeks to just under 20 minutes. Preventive maintenance planning times decreased from over three weeks to 13 minutes.

Telefónica has seen vastly improved customer experience, reduced operating costs, and shorter go-to-market timeframes. Customers feel more supported and connected and can easily learn about new services, promotions, sales, and other updates.

Telefónica is now planning to extend the migration process to its integration layer and the deployment of all new microservice developments. The Telefónica Movistar Colombia development team is also participating in the Red Hat Developers DevNation Deep Dive, which aims to identify other initiatives that can be developed and migrated.