Turkcell Group is a telecommunication and technology services provider founded and headquartered in Turkey. The company is Eastern Europe’s largest digital operator and is currently the only Turkish company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As of 2021, Turkcell Group has 39.3 million customers and more than 26,000 employees in five countries—Belarus, Cyprus, Germany, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Turkey’s largest data center and cloud services provider, Turkcell Group, prioritizes ensuring customers receive the best products and services. Turkcell provides software-as-a-service (SaaS), email, remote backup, and e-commerce solutions, as well as public, private and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions that exceed the exacting standards of its customers.
Utilizing the VMware Cloud Services Provider Program, Turkcell Group operates several world-class, internationally certified data centers. The Group is a VMware Cloud Verified Partner. These state-of-the-art facilities enable the company to offer virtual data center and disaster recovery services to its customers, supporting them to operate without interruption and meeting stringent business continuity requirements.
Süha Bayraktar, deputy general manager for cloud and IoT services, Turkcell Group, explains, “Whatever their industry, customers have three important expectations from us. The first is to predict the costs while managing IT growth flexibly. The second is to supply high-quality services that meet international standards. Finally, the third is to host data safely in Turkey.”
VMware is the trusted partner to help deliver and exceed these expectations. Having recently completed the migration of one of Turkey’s biggest e-commerce companies to its VMware-based cloud, Turkcell Group is moving forward in its plans to provide digital transformation solutions and services to its customers, with the VMware Cloud Services Provider Program at the core of its provision.
Improving data center services without the stress
As a Turkcell Group subsidiary, Turkcell Global Bilgi is Turkey’s leading customer experience center. Founded in 1999, it provides call center and digital services to sectors spanning finance, e-commerce, retail, and aviation, among others. In 2019, Turkcell Global Bilgi began its digital journey, moving toward an on-premises cloud solution. The increasingly obsolete data centers and inefficient legacy IT infrastructure hardware were nearing the end of life and required an excessive amount of time to maintain. In a dynamic market that continues to grow exponentially, Turkcell Global Bilgi needed to upgrade its data centers to stay ahead of the competition.
Turkcell Global Bilgi initially considered a move to public cloud computing; however, this was discounted due to Turkey’s strict IT laws and associated regulations governing operators. The team eventually decided on co-location as the preferred option to upgrade and manage its data centers. Working closely with VMware, Turkcell Global Bilgi chose VMware Cloud Foundation™, which gave the team confidence throughout the migration process. By trusting VMware to test and certify all the associated components—whether these were VMware products—Turkcell Global Bilgi is confident in compatibility and reducing stress, testing and implementation time.
Increasing efficiency and automation
This transformation has enabled Turkcell Global Bilgi to increase its data center virtualization rate to the highest possible level, ensuring that its infrastructure is as easy to provision, economical and manageable as virtual machines. Meanwhile, implementing VMware Cloud Foundation enabled the organization’s private clouds to become independent of hardware, increasing their efficiency and reducing much of the associated manual maintenance.
Increased automation of the various infrastructure services that the wider Turkcell Group provides to customers has also been made possible with the support of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator™. This reduces maintenance time and gives customers more control, enabling them to manage their resources, perform mitigation operations and monitor systems remotely.
With the range and reliability of cloud services that Turkcell Group can now provide using the VMware Cloud Services Provider Program, its customers are well-supported to switch to more profitable structures easily. This continues to have a positive impact on the Group’s business, with ambitious plans for future growth. “We aim to become the main data center in the region, with data center projects in Izmir and Ankara planned to be complete within the coming year,” says Bayraktar.
Due to its partnership with VMware, Turkcell Group no longer must solve technical problems to solve its customers’ problems, resulting in the growth of its cloud enterprise services business by a remarkable 60 percent year-on-year and demonstrating excellent potential for the future.
