New Way Now: Virgin Media O2 puts data at the heart of UK connectivity with Google Cloud
21Featured in this video: Chandu Bhuman, Senior Manager for Platform Architecture and Engineering, and Vinay Pai, Head of Data Architecture, at Virgin Media O2.
Executive summary: Virgin Media O2, which unites the UK’s top mobile and media networks, faced a major roadblock on its mission to supercharge the nation’s connectivity: fragmented data platforms that limited agility and innovation. With Google Cloud, Virgin Media O2 embarked on a data transformation journey, building a unified data platform on BigQuery for all its enterprise analytics data and enabling real-time data streaming. Now, Virgin Media O2 has a data engine that runs around the clock, unlocking 24/7 data availability and drastically improving data reliability for decision-making. The results? A 50% boost in time to market, 30% savings in overall costs, and — most importantly — more service choice and better value for over 45 million connections.
Challenge: To keep the UK connected, Virgin Media O2 needs to put data at the heart of its products and services. However, the company faced significant challenges with trying to gather vital insights from across fragmented legacy data platforms, limiting its ability to innovate, improve, and personalize connectivity services.
Solution: Before it could revolutionize the telecommunications industry, Virgin Media O2 realized it would first need to transform its data architecture. With Google Cloud, Virgin Media O2 created a unified data platform, migrating all of its enterprise analytics data to BigQuery and transitioning to event-driven streaming to continuously capture and process data in real time. This step was critical in establishing a strong data foundation, empowering Virgin Media O2 to manage and utilize its data more effectively. Instead of waiting for fresh data to process overnight, teams now have accurate, consistent, and up-to-date data at their disposal around the clock, significantly improving the reliability of the data-driving critical business decisions. Plus, Virgin Media O2 can now tap into the full power of the Google Cloud ecosystem to drive future stages of its transformation journey, including generative AI tools like Gemini Code Assist to boost development velocity and fuel business growth.
Results: Now, Virgin Media O2 has the engine it needs to put data behind every decision it makes, marking a major transformation in the way it operates. Already, the new platform has made a huge impact, delivering a 50% boost in time to market, 30% savings in overall costs, and — most importantly — more service choice and better value for millions of customers.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Chandu Bhuman, Senior Manager for Platform Architecture and Engineering, and Vinay Pai, Head of Data Architecture, at Virgin Media.
→ “One of our biggest challenges in the past has been fragmented data platforms, limiting the services we could offer. We also had challenges trying to unwind years of legacy platforms into new ways of working. BigQuery has been the key technology enabling our platform modernization strategy.”
→ “Improved reliability of data has been one of the key things for decision making capabilities. Data is now available pretty much 24/7, where in the past it was only available during the daytime. The time to market for products and solutions has improved about 50% in terms of how soon we react to our customer needs.”
→ “One of the most important benefits has been around the total cost of ownership, where we have seen measurable financial savings as part of our platform modernization strategy, around 30% in terms of our overall cost.”
→ “We are a very large organization with multiple projects running in parallel with hundreds of developers working at the same time. Increasing developer velocity is one of the key areas where we are constantly trying to improve. Recently, we [did] a POC on Gemini Code assist with the Cloud Workstations. The results are promising, and we plan to roll out to 200 developers to analyze productivity in the next six months.”
Google Cloud products used: BigQuery, Gemini, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Memorystore, Looker
Learn more:
→ Modernizing telecommunications and keeping the UK connected: https://goo.gle/3Yefm80
→ How Virgin Media O2 simplified internal data sharing with BigQuery’s Analytics Hub: https://goo.gle/4lhYWp7
→ How Virgin Media O2 began a five-year Google Cloud migration post-merger to unify data and improve business and customer experiences:
https://goo.gle/42wQwTo