Tech talks: Welcome to the data ocean

Johan Wibergh, Vodafone Group’s chief technology officer (CTO) talks about Vodafone Neuron – the company’s new cloud platform. This data ocean allows for real time data insights – that’s bringing benefits across the company and right to the phone of the end consumer.

As with many other companies, we created a big data system. We did ours five years ago – over 600 servers, holding the mass of data from across the whole company.

We’ve been really happy with how it’s worked for us – it’s helped us to improve how we plan our network. and improve the customer offering.

But we also had a lot of limitations. Hence we decided about a year ago we’d change this, and instead create a cloud-based big data system – a data ocean.

We’ve called it Vodafone Neuron, and this new platform gives us industry-leading insights about our business.

Future proofing

Using cloud servers we have securely combined anonymised data – those 600 servers across 11 countries – from which we gain real time insights using big data analysis.

It’s been an amazing journey. I’m so happy about the capabilities we have right now, and the limitations we’ve been able to take away.

We can much better plan and optimise our network – because it’s really irritating for our customers if there are places without signal, and the experience is not good enough.

We’ve also been able to build that functionality into the My Vodafone app.

Customers will feel the impact through the ability to personalise more effectively – serving them offers like data top ups when most needed for example.

Or when they get better mobile service because we optimised our networks using AI. Or have a better customer service experience because our staff are able to respond in a more targeted way.

I see enormous possibilitites in what we can do with this system – I’m so happy we decided to make this change.

I’m convinced it’s going to be great for our customers – and ourselves in the coming years.

Join the conversation and learn more from Johan on LinkedIn