Telecom Argentina builds agile business on Cloud Foundation

At Telecom Argentina we have been building a public cloud-based digital ecosystem that is today making connectivity a competitive edge when we serve our 29 million customers. But we have had to overcome several obstacles along the way. One of our biggest challenges when setting out to become a digital services provider is that we are the fruit of a merger between three companies with different origins, technologies, and cultures (fixed mobile and Pay TV). The other major challenge is we began building our cloud-based platform in 2020, within the exceptionally challenging context of the pandemic. Nonetheless, by focusing on customer loyalty and using DevOps, we were able to quickly start developing a cloud-native 100% digital business that delivers results, which we are now scaling up through the regular addition of new 100% digital solutions.

Laying the foundations

One of the first and most difficult steps in creating a new agile service culture was to ensure our teams had the right mix of skills. We therefore created a transformation program called "Cloud Foundation”, which addressed the cultural aspects of transformation, while helping us put in place new platforms, operations and security. Using the “Cloud Foundation” framework, we worked with employees to adopt a new "Cloud Mindset". This involved reskilling existing personnel and bringing on board new hires, which together formed new pools of skill sets. At the same time, we promoted autonomy and the adoption of self-service portals to enhance the use of digital tools. Through our “Cloud Mindset" program, we trained remotely more than 700 IT employees in new technologies and work methodologies. Using the cloud-native model, we helped teams adopt an agile, scalable, flexible, and cost-effective approach; being disruptive and testing solutions quickly without making large investments in hardware. The other important structure we put in place was our Cloud Business Office, which is an interdisciplinary center of excellence to drive an accelerated and sustainable cloud adoption across the organization, involving different business areas. From a technological point of view, we implemented a serverless structure, based on containers and microservices which, in combination with different cloud providers, allowed us to expand the portfolio of services with the creation of agile and scalable applications. This, in turn, accelerated development and delivery of our products and services.

New services

As a result of the changes, we are using 100% digital services to improve customer service in multiple ways, including invoicing and e-commerce:

• Invoicing - our enterprise customers needed to access their invoices and make their payments through digital channels (with a thirty-day baseline). We were able to implement an application to make digital payments in just five days and another application to access invoices digitally, in less than ten days.
• E-Commerce – a fully Public Cloud (AWS) initiative for purchasing cellphones and accessories through a digital channel. Our legacy systems were designed for in-person customer interaction. We created a 100% end-to-end digital purchasing experience for our customers that is fast and simple.

Becoming a digital service provider

We used frameworks developed by the TM Forum under the Open Digital Architecture and Open API programs to effect change. TM Forum frameworks allowed us to develop practices to accelerate agile models to integrate Telecom Argentina with suppliers, customers, and partners. Within this framework, and directly linked to our "Cloud Foundation" program, we also launched a program called "APIfication" designed to maximize our strategy towards "no-code development" and with a focus on: The implementation of an API Management strategy allowed our teams to:

• Reducing costs and development times for implementing new products and services.
• Aligning business goals with IT projects, with a vision driven by enterprise domains and building APIs as products.
• Easily discover and reuse available APIs.
• Obtain functional and technical metrics and statistics about the adoption and evolution of APIs.
• Accelerate our main digital programs and initiatives (CRM, digital channels, Flow, IOT, B2B, Fintech)
• Facilitate the digital transformation for BSS/OSS processes, depict the path to "cloud native" and "low-code development" platforms and services

Results

This cloud adoption journey allowed Telecom Argentina to achieve some remarkable results during 2020:

• +700 employees trained completely remotely.
• Time to market:
  • Digital Payments: Launched our payment microsite in just 5 days. After two weeks of operation, we were processing over 300,000 transactions.
  • Invoice visualization tool: the time to deploy was 10 days, achieving +2500 invoice downloads within the first week of operation, receiving positive feedback from customers about speed, agility, and ease of use of this new service.
  • 36x faster growth in application deployment with a combination of cloud-native tools and DevOps methodologies. Autonomy with governance, agility with automation and collaboration with alignment and imagination