In Russia, Europe’s largest country and largest telco market, it takes a grander mindset to succeed.
MTS is the market leader. It has more than 100 million active subscribers across all services, and operates in Ukraine, Armenia, and Belarus. And it is much more than a provider of mobile phone services. MTS has business lines covering mobile broadband, fixed line, pay-TV, and video on demand. It has a bank, it invests in FinTech, and it is starting to offer services around Big Data, eSports, cyber security, and IoT. It also sells branded devices.
Naturally, to make sense of this vast portfolio, MTS needs, where possible, common platforms.
The company is creating a global IT and network infrastructure, one that is unified and universal. MTS wants its service infrastructure to be at a high state of readiness, should an opportunity present itself – scalable, efficient and easily replicable in the regions. If a new service isn’t generating a decent margin, it wants to spot this and terminate it. MTS doesn’t want to be saddled with huge under-utilized resources.
MTS wants to be faster to market with new services, particularly digital. To do so it wants to transform its service infrastructure, creating a software and data-driven, programmable and automated service delivery platform. Once complete this will provide the economics, scale, innovation and operational flexibility needed.
VMware vCloud NFV is a fully integrated, modular, multi-tenant Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform. It provides MTS with compute, storage, networking, management and operations capabilities. vCloud NFV helps the business accelerate time to revenue, automate service lifecycle and simplify operations management – all while reducing network infrastructure costs.
It is also more efficient to manage and orchestrate. vCloud NFV delivers a single pane of glass with 360-degree visibility and monitoring of the MTS platform along with predictive analytics and logging insights to give greater control of the network. With policy-based automation, MTS can streamline key network processes and allocate and provision VM resources to rapidly provision and deploy NFVs.
This is more than theoretical, it is delivering a real, competitive advantage. Time to market is critical in a highly competitive telco market, particularly one that covers 11 time zones and 17 million square kilometres. Who provides their services fastest, across the whole of Russia, wins.
For MTS, whether it is banking, eSports, video on demand or a new application for mobile customers, it would take an age to implement a new service on traditional infrastructure. And for MTS, that is unthinkable.
To understand more about how MTS is benefting from NFV, watch this video or read this case study.
