Industry
Communications, Media and Information Services
Connect. Curate. Comprehend: Unlocking Value Beyond Boundaries
Highlights
- VMO2, a leading telecom provider in the UK faced significant limitations with its legacy on-premises data infrastructure, restricting its ability to enhance customer engagement, deliver personalization, optimize network investments, and modernize operations.
- To address these challenges, VMO2 adopted a Cloud-first strategy and began migrating its data ecosystem to Google Cloud.
- The transformation aimed to unlock scalable data insights, automate operations, enable AI/ML capabilities, improve efficiency, accelerate innovation, boost revenue, and reduce operational costs.
On this page
Overview
TCS is helping VMO2 reimagine its data ecosystem on Google Cloud, paving the way for a cloud-first future.
Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), a leading telecom provider in the UK, encountered major challenges with its aging, on-premises data infrastructure. These constraints limited the company’s ability to enhance customer engagement, deliver personalized experiences, optimize network investments, and modernize its operations.
To overcome these hurdles, VMO2 adopted a Cloud-first strategy, by migrating its data ecosystem to Google Cloud - a strategic move designed to meet the evolving demands of its digital transformation. With Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, VMO2 is now equipped to unlock real-time data analytics, enhance operational efficiency and accelerate innovation across its services.
Partnering with TCS on our cloud-first transformation has been truly empowering. Their deep expertise and collaborative approach helped us modernise our data platforms, accelerate innovation, and deliver personalised experiences to our customers at scale.”
Challenge
VMO2 builds cloud-first strategy to overcome legacy data constraints
VMO2 faced significant limitations with its legacy on-premises data platforms. The company struggled with siloed data systems that prevented a unified view of customer information, while its infrastructure featuring the largest Data warehouse stack and Data Lake platforms incurred high maintenance costs and lacked scalability. The complexity of the platform slowed the time-to-market for new products and services, and the growing volume of network data made it difficult to support real-time analytics and AI use cases. Additionally, maintaining and updating the system demanded substantial effort from the IT team, diverting resources away from strategic initiatives. These challenges hindered VMO2’s ability to enhance customer experience, enable personalization, optimize network investments, and modernize operations.
To overcome these obstacles, VMO2 adopted a Cloud-first strategy, aiming to migrate its data ecosystem to Google Cloud. This strategic shift was designed to unlock data value at speed and scale, automate operations, enable advanced analytics and AI/ML capabilities, optimize data mining efficiencies, accelerate the development of new capabilities, maximize revenue, and reduce operational expenses.
Solution
TCS empowers VMO2’s Cloud-first journey through a strategic alliance for scalable data modernization
Partnering with VMO2 for over two decades and intensively over the past six years, TCS played a pivotal role in designing and delivering a Cloud-first, unified data platform on Google Cloud during this transformation journey. Key aspects of the solution included:
Strategic Migration Planning: Co-created a comprehensive migration roadmap and data strategy, detailing phased delivery, critical milestones, and optimized resource allocation. The plan included a robust data and Extract Transform and Load (ETL) migration approach to ensure data integrity, minimal downtime, and seamless operational continuity.
Comprehensive Legacy Platform Modernization: Delivered a full-scale migration of legacy data platforms, including one of the largest Data warehouse-to-Google Cloud transitions and the re-platforming of a 600-node Data Lake environment. This modernization effort involved re-engineering over 15 years of deeply embedded legacy code and systems, leveraging TCS-developed accelerators and frameworks for efficient schema conversion, data ingestion, and transformation.
Platform Evaluation and Data Assurance: Undertook a thorough assessment of the existing platform, leveraging the combined expertise of VMO2 and TCS to identify critical components, interdependencies, and performance bottlenecks. To maintain data integrity and trust throughout the migration process, automated reconciliation and validation were implemented, enabling seamless and reliable checks both during and after migration.
Cloud-Native Architecture Co-Creation: Collaboratively designed a cloud-native architecture centered on BigQuery and Dataflow to enable real-time data enrichment and analytics.
Framework-Driven Compliance, Governance, and Pipeline Optimization: To streamline operations and strengthen compliance, VMO2 and TCS developed reusable ingestion frameworks and standardized design patterns, transforming complex data pipelines into a scalable, factory-style model. A customized and easily configurable SOX compliance framework was implemented on Google Cloud , incorporating key audit controls to ensure alignment with regulatory and corporate standards. Additionally, an end-to-end data lineage solution was established at both table and column levels, enabling complete traceability from Google Cloud back to the metadata management system—significantly enhancing data governance, transparency, and audit readiness.
Data Observability Dashboards: Developed dynamic dashboards to monitor data flows, pipeline performance, and SLA adherence, enabling proactive management and trend analysis.
Outcomes
TCS contributed to VMO2’s data transformation success by driving measurable business impactFaster, more efficient operations: Modernised GIS workflows and cleaner data significantly accelerated planning, troubleshooting, and service delivery.
The transformation has been a game-changer for VMO2’s data strategy, delivering measurable impact across key areas:
- 50% faster time-to-market, enabling quicker launches of new products and services
- 30% reduction in overall data platform costs, enhancing operational efficiency
- Scalable, cloud-native infrastructure, capable of processing high volumes of data in real time
- Enhanced customer experience and personalization, powered by unified, such as
- Improved network coverage and diagnostics, enabling faster issue resolution and proactive maintenance
- Personalised services tailored to customer needs, driven by advanced analytics and AI
- Robust compliance and audit readiness, aligned with regulatory standards
- Future-ready foundation for AI, ML, and advanced analytics, with a strong emphasis on data quality and trust
Now, Virgin Media O2 has the engine it needs to put data at the heart of every decision—unlocking faster innovation, better service, and greater value for millions of customers.