UPDATED 14:50 EDT / NOVEMBER 30 2021

CLOUD

Vodafone UK transforms from telco to Europe’s largest software engineering organization

Application modernization has become an enterprise imperative, and executives buzz about “shift left” and “business agility.” But after the push to migrate applications into the cloud moves to day-to-day cloud operations, companies find that transformation is about more than technology. The new way of working causes cultural changes that benefit employees, customers, and the bottom line.

“Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in such a short space of time really does bring to life our ability to trial and error, to A/B test, canary deploy,” said Ben Connolly (pictured, right), chief information officer/global director of cloud engineering and head of digital engineering UK at Vodafone Group PLC. “It’s been a real superpower for our transformation.”

Connolly and Maynard Williams (pictured, left), managing director of IT architecture and solution delivery, custom technologies at Accenture PLC, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. They discussed how Vodafone worked with the Accenture AWS Business Group to accelerate its digital transformation and become the largest software engineering organization in Europe. (* Disclosure below.)

AWS, Accenture and Vodafone join forces to turbocharge digital transformation

Vodafone’s transformation from a “regular” telco to a cloud native digital business was underpinned by its adoption of AWS managed services such as Elastic Kubernetes Service and serverless compute engine Fargate. These services have changed how the company operates by enabling speed and flexibility across the board.

Between Amazon Web Services Inc., Accenture and Vodafone, “architecting something that is robust, scales, reusable and takes away a load of pieces that were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward,” Williams said.

Fargate gets a specific mention from Connolly, who saw company-wide changes after adoption of the technology.

“It’s driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches, and it all now leverages that ability to move apace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in the ability to deliver for the business commercially as well,” Connolly stated.

Before moving to the AWS cloud, deploying a new application or preparing for a major event such as an iPhone launch or Black Friday required two or three months of preparation. Now, Vodafone has the agility to deploy continuously and scale up and down as needed, according to Connolly. This has removed the friction barrier between the company and its customers, enabling almost instantaneous feedback.

“We learn constantly because of that, and it’s become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases,” Connolly said.

Employees are more invested in producing quality work

The immediate feedback also makes employees more invested in their work, and their connection to the outcomes and value that they add into production has led to a new, more engaged culture across Vodafone’s engineering teams.

“If I can deploy code immediately [and] see an impact, good or bad, then I do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I’m driving to the business and to our customers,” Connolly stated.

It’s a light-bulb moment, according to Williams.

“You move away from a model of ‘we change code because either the business tells us to because they have a functional requirement or because something’s broken’ and get into the model of ‘I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that’s live,’” he said. “Suddenly, you see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability. All of those things improve.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: Accenture PLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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