Vodafone consolidates 40 global data centers into 6 with OCI Dedicated Region

Vodafone, a leading European and African telecom company, is turning itself into a technology communications company—a software-led, cloud-based provider of high-value services to consumers and businesses.

The telecom has a track record of building successful business platforms. It’s the world’s largest provider of managed Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity services, serving customers in a variety of industries, including the automotive, medical device, and industrial equipment sectors, across more than 180 countries. Automakers, for example, use the carrier’s IoT platform for automated maintenance scheduling, self-parking cars, and more.

To take advantage of massive growth opportunities, Vodafone had to be sure that its core IT services, including business and operations support systems, could meet the fast-moving needs of customer-facing IT. These front- and back-end services are interconnected and require low latency and high security, so moving to a public cloud on its own was not a viable option.  

Vodafone needed a way to consolidate and centralize multiple databases and workloads while also modernizing legacy Oracle’s distributed cloud, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region in Vodafone’s own data centers and the multicloud Oracle Database@Azure service, provided the flexible and cost-efficient approach the telecom needed.

“The flexibility offered by OCI let us build a robust, secure cloud platform in our own facilities, with the agility and scalability to support innovation and growth. We can offer better digital experiences at reduced costs,” says Pedro Sardo, director of IT operations, infrastructure, and technology at Vodafone.

The company learned that OCI Dedicated Region would put all the capabilities and more than 150  services from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure public offering inside its own data centers. Other hyperscale cloud providers could not deliver this on-premises cloud capability, optimized for Oracle workloads and equipped with fully autonomous platform services such as Oracle Autonomous AI Database. The setup would give the carrier the cost, security, performance, uptime, scalability, and agility benefits of OCI within its own data centers and on its own network.

Vodafone provides space, power, and cooling, and Oracle manages everything else. Across thousands of databases and related applications, Vodafone and Oracle optimized migrations and decommissions to increase productivity and save costs. Due to these efficiencies, the company was able to use OCI Dedicated Region to consolidate 40 data centers into only six dedicated regions hosted in three countries.

The telecom can now access compute, storage, and networking resources to dynamically augment and scale services in multiple geographies when business requirements change while reducing operational costs and meeting data residency requirements. Moving to OCI Dedicated Region has also allowed the telecom to use automation to accelerate code releases for core services while maintaining performance, scalability, and resilience.

As part of its distributed cloud strategy to develop and deliver secure, resilient, and innovative services faster and at scale, Vodafone values the multicloud partnership between Oracle and Azure. The company can confidently select the best cloud for the application and business data and run workloads natively on Oracle Autonomous AI Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service, or Oracle Base Database Service from Azure data centers. Additionally, Vodafone benefits from a simplified multicloud procurement process, access to enterprise credit programs, and unified support services, all of which remove fragmentation and duplication and help reduce .

With OCI Dedicated Region, Vodafone no longer assembles its own computing platforms for core services and instead uses a central platform where automation and security are built in for a classic “build once, deploy everywhere” approach. This method lets business unit leaders focus more on seizing revenue opportunities and meeting customers’ needs in their local markets and less on performing IT maintenance and updates.

Having cloud infrastructure within miles of its network and on-premises applications has helped Vodafone move off its legacy IT infrastructure at its own pace. To cement their technology partnership, Oracle and Vodafone created a center of excellence through which Oracle leads modernizing and migration efforts for Vodafone’s databases as they move to the new platform. This new migration factory has helped seamlessly transition thousands of databases and supporting applications. Additionally, redundant or unnecessary databases and applications have been decommissioned.

Individual divisions within the company have also benefited from the migration. Vodafone Business leveraged Oracle APEX, a low-code development platform provided with Oracle Autonomous AI Database, to build and manage applications for sales and commercial operations, finance, and product management. This enabled a seamless transition from disjointed systems to a unified, in-house development environment. “By leveraging Oracle APEX, we simplified operations, replaced costly, rigid systems with 50-plus low-code apps that deliver secure, tailored solutions, cut costs by up to 90%, and accelerated delivery from years to weeks,” says Filipe Zeferino, digital operations team leader at Vodafone Business.

To boost new digital-powered services, Vodafone is investing in software engineering and development talent, with plans to shift 50% of IT staff to such roles as it increases IT automation. OCI Dedicated Region has helped Vodafone modernize, manage, and automate critical systems using new technologies such as autonomous services. Also, the company can now more easily meet the latency and performance requirements of its applications, allowing it to focus on upskilling staff and increasing innovation.

Vodafone, a leading European and African telecom company, provides mobile and fixed services to more than 330 million customers in 15 countries. Vodafone partners with mobile networks in an additional 45 countries and runs one of the world’s largest IoT platforms.

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