Vodafone and Oracle Cloud strike multi-year deal to modernise telco’s European infrastructure

Vodafone has added Oracle to its roster of cloud provider partners, with the pair set to work together on a multi-year basis to revamp the telco giant’s IT infrastructure.

The company already has a multi-year deal in place with public cloud giant Google, and is now expanding its roll-call of cloud provider partners to include Oracle, as it gets to work on an initiative to consolidate and modernise the IT infrastructure underpinning its European operations.

Specifically, the company is looking to migrate its mission-critical applications and workloads to a shared, Oracle-powered on-premise infrastructure.

Among the workloads pegged for migration are thousands of Oracle databases, along with a large number of other systems that will be hosted within a fully managed, dedicated Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region.

This setup is designed to give the company access to all of the database software giant’s cloud services within Vodafone’s own datacentres.

Specifically, OCI Dedicated Regions will be deployed within the key datacentres that make up Vodafone’s European infrastructure, with the aim of enabling the company to create cloud-native apps more quickly.

“This will provide a dedicated cloud platform for Vodafone to modernise its thousands of Oracle databases, as well as to support and scale its mission-critical OSS [operations support systems] and BSS [business support systems] including CRM [customer relationship management] and order management,” said Vodafone in a statement.

“The deployment of public cloud services directly inside Vodafone’s own network and datacentres will enable the operator to flexibly modernise, manage and automate its critical systems using new technologies such as autonomous services, and more easily meet the latency and performance requirements of these applications.”

The setup will give Vodafone ready access to the compute resources it needs to dynamically scale services in multiple geographies, in line with changing business demands, the company said. 

“As Vodafone focuses on growth, data is key to how we evolve our business, build new capabilities and innovate to meet the needs of our customers,” said Scott Petty, chief digital and IT officer at Vodafone. “Our collaboration with Oracle supports our vision of becoming a technology communications company.

“The agreement enables Oracle to bring its entire portfolio of cloud services directly into Vodafone datacentres. This includes the same architecture, software, services and control plane used in OCI public cloud.”

Petty added: “The flexibility offered by OCI enables us to build a robust, secure and extensible cloud platform in our own datacentres, while also providing the operational agility and scalability required to support the growth and diversification of our business.”

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice-president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said Vodafone is one of a growing list of telcos that are seeking to revamp their business models with the help of digital transformation.

“Vodafone is at the forefront of this thinking, and we are excited to bring the power of OCI to Vodafone’s datacentres to support the company and its partners as they fast-track this vision and deliver the next generation of connected services,” said Magouyrk.

Jonathan Tikochinsky, executive vice-president of global strategic clients at Oracle, said: “Now more than ever, telecom companies need to quickly adopt new technologies to deliver new innovative products at speed while continuing to meet evolving regulatory requirements.

“Our partnership with Vodafone is based on achieving this balance, providing a cloud platform that enables Vodafone to modernise and consolidate its existing infrastructure while also building a foundation for a digital future.”