Laura Delarosa

5 results

MongoDB Atlas for Industries: Driving Retail Innovation from Supply Chain to Checkout

As retailers around the globe adopt a golden opportunity to modernize customer experiences with AI, personalization, and edge-based inventory management, MongoDB is launching a new initiative to boost the retail industry’s pace of innovation with data-driven applications. Today at MongoDB.local Paris , we announced the launch of MongoDB Atlas for Retail , a new innovation accelerator that provides expert-led innovation workshops, tailored technology partnerships, and an industry-specific knowledge incubator that builds customized training paths for customers. MongoDB Atlas for Retail spans advanced retail-industry use cases, including personalized e-commerce, omnichannel inventory management, workforce and in-store devices, AI-optimized supply chain, and sustainable data operations for future growth. In the modern and hyper-competitive global retail industry, enterprises are challenged with surging consumer demand, with global e-commerce sales expected to grow 56% by 2026. To keep up with modern industry standards, retailers are moving their data to the cloud and unifying siloed architectures by adopting MongoDB Atlas. “In today’s retail industry landscape, consumers expect smart search solutions, personalization, and real-time inventory management that creates seamless shopping experiences across mobile, web, and brick-and-mortar stores,” said Boris Bialek, Field CTO of Industry Solutions at MongoDB. “With MongoDB, enterprises are improving shopping experiences and preparing for the surge of growth ahead with pioneering e-commerce solutions while slashing costs with real-time analytics in the supply chain. MongoDB Atlas for Retail enables retailers to use their data for e-commerce growth while delighting customers with application-driven insights through a unified, fully managed, and cost-effective platform.” Global growth: From holiday surges to growing e-commerce consumer demand MongoDB is partnering with retailers globally to drive sustainable growth, profitability, and technology innovation. In one example, by moving its order management system from on-premises to a fully managed, cloud-based data platform, Radial boosted its ability to process $150 million in sales in a single day. Radial works with the world’s biggest brands and has grown its reputation as a trusted fulfillment provider for nearly 35 years, and also won a 2023 MongoDB Innovation Award . After selecting the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform, Radial improved performance, reduced latency, and developed real-time solutions for customers. “As a retail platform, we look for every opportunity to expand into the cloud. It offers the scalability we need to accommodate those seasonal peaks without creating complexity or escalating costs,” explains Eric Lutts, Senior Director of Database Engineering at Radial. “The support we get from MongoDB is second to none; amazing customer service is its DNA. I have experience with a lot of other database vendors, and what sets MongoDB apart is that they don’t just help, they educate so we can get the most from the platform in the future.” In partnership with public cloud providers like Google Cloud and the MACH Alliance pioneers at commercetools, MongoDB is also working behind the scenes with the largest beauty retailer in the U.S., Ulta Beauty , to seamlessly manage seasonal demand surges during holiday shopping. “We recently had an unplanned traffic surge that impacted our domain services. It took less than an hour for MongoDB Atlas to scale up to the next level of the cluster and manage that traffic,” says Sethu Madhav Vure, IT Architect, Ulta Beauty. “The on-demand, dynamic scaling, plus GKE, has saved the day more than once.” The keys to MongoDB retail solutions are speed and scalability. Take the German food delivery service Delivery Hero for example. With up to 12,000 requests per second, MongoDB Atlas enables a seamless web and mobile ordering experience for 2.2 billion multinational customers across 70 countries. Services like Delivery Hero need to be able to help customers quickly and easily find the foods they are craving. To handle random access requests at scale, the team considered using Elasticsearch, which would have added another database system for the group to maintain. But with MongoDB Atlas Search , Delivery Hero implemented the new features it needed in less than two weeks, versus three months with an outside vendor. “MongoDB Atlas Search was a game changer. We ran a proof of concept and discovered how easy it is to use. We can index in one click, and because it’s a feature of MongoDB, we know data is always up-to-date and accurate,” said Andrii Hrachov, principal software engineer at Delivery Hero. Build together: How MongoDB leverages tech partnerships to accelerate retail innovation From supply chain to checkout, MongoDB builds modern retail customer experiences with a strong support system. Today, it’s easier than ever for retailers and tech-forward e-commerce firms to find the right fit for online and mobile shopping platforms. Whether MongoDB customers are looking for a system integrator, a public cloud offering, or a built-in e-commerce platform, MongoDB has a vast network of partners at the ready. We're excited to announce that the MongoDB Partner Ecosystem Catalog has just launched alongside MongoDB Atlas for Retail. With this new tool, customers can easily discover what the MongoDB Partner Ecosystem has to offer. MongoDB works with more than 1,000 partners around the globe. Customers are now able to explore these partners and those who are part of the new AI innovators program. Using this discovery tool, customers can explore and filter the MongoDB Partner Ecosystem based on use case and industry, and discover how competitors and existing MongoDB customers are working together with the ecosystem. Start your journey with MongoDB Atlas for Retail MongoDB Atlas for Retail includes solutions and capabilities that can help organizations reimagine how they interact with end users by deploying data-driven applications with the flexibility, security, and resilience the retail industry requires: Run data-driven applications anywhere: MongoDB Atlas for the Edge enables organizations to deploy applications closer to where data is generated, processed, and stored, across mobile and IoT devices, on-premises servers, and multiple major cloud providers. For example, retail organizations can seamlessly deploy applications across mobile devices and on-premises services for interacting with customers when internet connectivity is unavailable while also ensuring data is synchronized with the cloud once connectivity is available. MongoDB Atlas for the Edge enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications that are accessible virtually anywhere without the complexity typically associated with operating distributed applications at the edge. Reimagine possibilities with innovation workshops: MongoDB Atlas for Retail includes dedicated executive engagement with industry experts from MongoDB and the MongoDB Partner Ecosystem to ideate client-specific solutions using best practices developed through proven industry experience. Retail innovation workshops are tailored to address the unique challenges and opportunities that organizations face so they can modernize their operations with security and compliance in mind. Jumpstart application development: With MongoDB Atlas for Retail, organizations can engage with the MongoDB Professional Services team to take advantage of retail expertise and accelerate projects from concept to prototype and to production in less time. Experts from the MongoDB Professional Services team can work backward from an organization’s specific challenges to conduct architectural reviews and help quickly prototype proofs of concept for ideation before moving new applications to production. Upskill teams to quickly build modern applications: MongoDB Atlas for Retail provides tailored MongoDB University courses and learning materials, including unlimited access to curated webinars and solutions sessions, to help developers learn how to quickly build modern applications for retail. Organizations can benefit from training new and experienced developers from the ground up on how to build modern, data-driven applications to modernize operations and reimagine end-user experiences. Power retail innovation and digital transformation across your organization by signing up to learn more about MongoDB Atlas for Retail, or visit us at booth E96 at Tech for Retail in Paris, November 28-29, 2023, or booth 1045 at NRF, Retail’s Big Show , in New York, January 13-16, 2024.

November 7, 2023

Best of Breed: commercetools on Building Composable Commerce on MongoDB

What’s behind the power of a modern, data-centric, composable commerce platform that solves all of the consumer demands in an increasingly AI-driven e-commerce landscape? Just ask Michael Scholz, the VP of Product and Customer Marketing at commercetools . commercetools Composable Commerce is an industry-leading commerce platform used by leading household brands like Express Inc., Danone, Ulta Beauty , Salling Group , John Lewis and partners , and KMart , all of which are building best-in-class omnichannel shopping experiences. Modern, data-centric composable commerce Mr. Scholz took to the stage at MongoDB.local NYC to talk about how MongoDB is powering commercetools' Composable Commerce platform, and how together MongoDB and commercetools are addressing the challenge of growth in the retail industry. “Global retail sales are about to grow 56% to just a little over 8 trillion. The real question here is: Are the retailers ready for what’s ahead of them?” he asked. It’s a difficult question for many of those in the retail industry to answer, whether they’re retailers building e-commerce stacks in-house, or software companies trying to build a packaged e-commerce solution. Here’s a deep insight into how commercetools have succeeded and why they chose MongoDB as their trusted advisor. commercetools started building on MongoDB from day one, as they saw the database and the Atlas fully managed service as a best-of-breed option. They’re not in the business of managing data, they want to focus on value add features for their product and company: “We don’t want to be the custodians of data, we want to focus on what is important to us, which is commerce,” Mr. Scholz said in New York. MongoDB Atlas allows commercetools to do that by offering a fully managed database as a service that is cloud-native SaaS, reducing the operational effort for commercetools of managing thousands of databases and providing a highly available and scalable service. Elastic scale is incredibly important in retail with peak events like Black Friday, Christmas, and unplanned traffic surges, for example, should an influencer spark demand for a product unexpectedly. The shared ability of MongoDB Atlas and commercetools’ ability to grow or shrink automatically in response to demand is key, making the system highly performant at scale and also cost-effective during low traffic. commercetools are considered thought leaders in the software industry due to their thinking and sharing of architectural best practices. commercetools CEO Dirk Hoerig coined the term Headless , and commercetools are the co-founders of the MACH Alliance , which champions microservice, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless architecture practices. MongoDB is an enabler member of the MACH Alliance; its global multi-cloud database enables the building of a MACH compliance architecture and promotes a lean and agile development environment. “APIs can and will forever be able to be consumed by any consumer device, front-end, or other application,” according to Dirk Hoerig, the CEO and co-founder of commercetools. In this setup, it’s vital that the backend is fast and dependable. With MongoDB Atlas’ high availability architecture, commercetools was capable of offering the unbelievable SLA of 100% uptime for three years in a row in Europe! “Nobody is going to believe that, but if we’re looking at that and looking at our GCP instance, we have 100% uptime for GCP and for MongoDB. In the U.S., we had 99.99%, and it’s really just a rounding error,” Mr. Scholz said at MongoDB.local NYC. “It’s all about high performance and low latency.” Dive further into the talk to learn about composable commerce, and why MongoDB is a match made in heaven for commercetools to unlock more growth possibilities and deliver outstanding shopping experiences while innovating fast to be ready for what’s next. What makes commercetools & MongoDB the perfect match MongoDB powers commercetools to deliver innovation at speed. Through this partnership and with MongoDB's robust technology, commercetools has built truly composable technology for businesses that require unlimited flexibility and infinite scale at lower costs. “We’ve realized the only constant is change,” Mr. Scholz said. “We don’t really know what’s about to happen. It’s all about how we can future-proof our software, and how we accomplish that with MongoDB.” Mr. Scholz illustrates why MongoDB is the perfect match for modern data-centric commerce in four key areas: Figure 1: commercetools chose MongoDB because it helps them iterate quickly, gives them unlimited scale, can run anywhere and to build better apps faster. Embracing the future: Integrating AI into retail Looking forward to the future of retail tech, the challenge of integrating AI into applications is fast approaching. Mr. Scholz highlighted how the ability to clean, migrate, and enrich data through the use of MongoDB’s flexible document model helps them to build out customized AI experiences for customers. These are the building blocks from which we can begin to talk about AI-powered analytics, supply chain, personalization, and more. Figure 2: Retail reference architecture with commercetools and MongoDB commercetools have been using machine learning for a long time, one of the key use cases is to help retailers easily create categories and product types automatically when they import product data sets into MongoDB. With GenAI top of mind, commercetools are looking for the first set of use cases like speeding up promotion creation- leveraging models on top of their data in MongoDB to auto-generate content for brand portfolios that matches their tone and audience. A perfect partnership This modern, data-centric, composable commerce platform is the basis of huge success for commercetools and its customers. Through innovative architecture and quick iteration of new features, commercetools has become the leading technology in its field. Their customer’s results include inspiring numbers such as: + 35% average order value, + 2X Sales Order Increase, + 40% Increase in Cross-Selling, and + 100ms response time. For more reading on how MongoDB enables software companies and retailers to build architectures that align to MACH Principals: MACH Aligned for Retail (Microservices, API-First, Cloud Native SaaS, Headless) | MongoDB

August 10, 2023

How Telcos Drive Mission-Critical Innovation and Cost Savings Through Automation

Modern telecommunications customers don’t only expect flawless network performance, they demand it. For global enterprises that hold the key to human connection, the industry standard is nothing less than a fully integrated, customer-centric approach to service delivery. How are telecommunications firms tackling these customer expectations today? By embracing AI and machine learning capabilities, developing new decisioning models, and ensuring network security and optimization with a 99.995% uptime SLA. Why automation is vital in the telco modernization journey AI adoption is growing at a break-neck speed, and the telecommunications industry has a close eye on the way that automated decision-making can improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. In the latest TM Forum Digital Transformation Tracker 7 survey , 73% of respondents agreed that operational efficiency and cost reduction were very important drivers of CSPs’ digital transformation journeys, compared with 69% in 2022 and 65% in 2018. By eliminating manual tasks, and reducing errors introduced by manual intervention, automation is improving end-to-end performance and reducing handoffs and touchpoints. In the case of automated decision-making, it’s possible to leverage large volumes of data that already exist within telco organizations, alongside data science and machine learning techniques, to generate data-driven insights and inferences to better serve customers and develop cost savings. Three automation use cases in the telecommunications industry Here are three ways that MongoDB’s customers in the telecommunications industry can innovate with automation: Service assurance processes: Telcos can proactively identify issues impacting customers, or even predict them before they occur, utilizing automated processing of large amounts of diverse data. Network automation techniques can then step in to automatically remediate the situation, and output intent that can be processed by intent-based network automation tooling. Network automation: While service assurance processes can make decisions around what needs to be done, network automation tooling takes responsibility for effecting change. What’s more, the demands of 5G networks will force operators to open up traditional closed systems to third parties via network APIs. For example, these APIs can allow automated provisioning and configuration of 5G network slices. Customer expectations here will be that these operations are self-serve, and will happen in real time, making automation key. Customer issue management: We’ve all come across chatbots used in B2C customer service experiences. As chatbots become more sophisticated, potentially leveraging modern generative AI techniques, many more customer care issues will be automated. This change will not only reduce the cost of call centers, but speed up mean time to resolution for customer care issues. The future of AI/ML-based automated decision-making in telecommunications We’ve established the importance of automation for service assurance, network automation, and customer experiences. By utilizing the power of AI and data science, telcos have the opportunity to take these technologies further into the realm of network security and fraud mitigation. However, getting to automation with unstructured data is no simple task. Studies show that more than 50% of data scientists’ time is spent wrangling data, and more than 80% of all essential data is unstructured. Figure 1: Data processing operations for machine learning models. To build out a new AI/ML-based system, both data processing and ML capabilities must be in place. These two solutions are typically provided by different systems with clear integration points. Any AI/ML-based solution requires large amounts of historical data to train the model. The storage and feeding of this data is usually the job of a traditional data warehouse system. This gets complicated when decisions need to be made in real time with “live” data, such as in anti-fraud use cases. To achieve real-time results, it’s required to integrate an operational database into the architecture to stream real-time data and requests into the model and to persist the model output. In this hybrid system example, we have both operational and analytics data requirements co-existing; this interaction adds to the overall architectural complexity of the system. It’s important to note that raw data cannot be used by AI models “as it.” First the data must be cleaned, potentially deduplicated and turned into features. Standardized techniques are required to do this, including binning, normalization, standardization, and one-hot encoding. The aggregation pipeline provides powerful data processing capabilities that assist with this process. MongoDB Atlas, the developer data platform, is capable of handling each of the above requirements from a single platform. Its analytical nodes and Data Lake allow for massive amounts of historical data storage, and service to the model for training purposes. Figure 2: MongoDB's role in machine learning pipeline. Real-time data can also be ingested and served through MongoDB Atlas via change streams, triggers, and integrations. The powerful aggregation framework of MongoDB is capable of transforming raw data into usable features. Lastly, integration patterns based on Spark, Kafka, and HTTP are supported out of the box, which greatly reduces overall architectural complexity. Once decision-making models produce the new data output, it can be persisted back into the transactional database automatically actioned by additional automation tooling. Decision-making models will constantly evolve and will require new facets of data to be used. MongoDB’s document model and dynamic schema naturally supports the ingestion of new types and formats of data without the need for complex schema changes. > Join MongoDB, Hansen Technology and TM Forum for a live discussion on the future of AI in the telecommunications industry.

July 10, 2023

Telco Scaling Strategies: Modernizing Business Support Systems for Flexible Revenue Growth

Consumers and businesses alike are driving huge demand for innovative telecommunications technology that tests the limits of monolithic, traditional business support system (BSS) architecture. The competition is fierce within the industry, tipping telcos to differentiate their businesses with fresh digital services like low latency mobile apps, ultra-fast streaming services, virtual reality, and IoT solutions. The worldwide adoption of 5G is driving the change, bringing with it the need to simplify architectures to accommodate the complexity of modern 5G networks, which require multiple assurances, orchestration, provisioning, and charging functions to aggregate data effectively and manage services. Alongside the development of headline-grabbing technologies, telecommunications enterprises are also busy building increasingly customer-centric experiences. Fast, reliable communication is essential for all people, from the average consumer who expects flawless performance, to the enterprises that need to run mission-critical business processes over telecommunications networks. These interactions matter immensely for customer loyalty. Partnering together, Tech Mahindra and MongoDB have ushered telcos through their ongoing BSS modernization journeys by enabling business growth and operational efficiencies with solutions ranging from core network functions through to product catalog and customer management systems. Today, we see that the biggest hurdles standing in the way of telco innovation are legacy data architectures that eat up developers’ time with time-consuming maintenance work. Building a consolidated view: Drilling into customer data Billing modernization is a big market. The global telecommunications billing and revenue management market size reached $13 billion in 2019, and is forecast to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 11.6% to more than $31 billion between 2020 and 2027, according to research prepared by Forrester Research, Inc. Core, consolidated customer data act as an enabler for many other related solutions that share the need for a solid, reliable record of customer core data. The common factor for payment processing, customer loyalty programs, service provisioning, service usage, and finally billing generation, is customer core data. Figure 1:   Customer centricity in billing Like many large corporations, CSPs are often made up of siloed application stacks broken out by product area, such as VoIP, mobile, cable, and so on. Since customers use products and services that exist within multiple silos, changes to customer data need to be propagated to multiple systems. The lack of a single, consolidated view is often a result of historical mergers and acquisitions. Without the ability to analyze data within a single view, opportunities to capitalize on data analytics to uncover cross-selling and up-selling opportunities are lost. Furthermore, enterprises managing multiple parallel billing implementations and the systems’ associated data synchronization infrastructure can incur hefty costs and architectural complexity. The best way to address these challenges is to modernize core customer data systems to have a single view of customers and their billing-related data. At the heart of these modernization projects is the move to a new platform. Product catalog simplification and the hybrid cloud approach Akin to the global-scale retailers with some of the most complex product offerings around, telcos have a complicated array of product offerings that require CPQ processes to be able to combine offerings. Whether a telco is combining handsets, tariffs, warranties, add-ons or promotions, managing data in a streamlined and scalable infrastructure is a crucial modernization strategy. What’s more, telcos must deliver personalized and real-time shopping experiences to customers across web, mobile, phone, and in-store platforms to stay competitive. The modernization and simplification of a telco’s product catalog architecture can quickly turn into a complicated mess when certain existing legacy systems must stay in place. Making one swift rip-and-replace move can be a big risk with costly implications for long-term transformation projects. Today, more and more successful modernization strategies are achieving omnichannel implementation and multi-play services goals by migrating incrementally. This enables telcos to set the stage for a successful migration, at the right pace for the company. A key part of a modernization strategy is often a move from a self-managed, on-premise architecture to a cloud-based one. Initially, a hybrid cloud strategy is often more cost-efficient, and acts as an important stepping stone in any enterprise’s digital transformation journey. The limits of existing legacy systems inhibit telcos’ ability to scale and grow. As the telecommunications industry reimagines how to apply new technology in the digital-first world, heavier reliance on the public cloud is delivering operational and competitive advantages. But for an industry with complex legacy infrastructure and loads of personal data, moving every workload to the cloud isn’t feasible yet. Through implementation projects with telcos around the world, Tech Mahindra has proven that a central commercial catalog, integrated with the right legacy technical catalogs and BSS stacks, improves time-to-market for launching multiple bundles and offers that are still processed and billed to a single customer. The benefits of this hybrid approach are immediately apparent: Faster time-to-market Increase in sales Improved customer satisfaction Reduced handling time Less fallouts, errors, and training time Through Tech Mahindra’s BlueMarble Commerce solution, underpinned by MongoDB, telecommunications enterprises are quickly overhauling their omnichannel strategy without overhauling their business or existing systems. A true end-to-end omnichannel multi-play solution for telcos, BlueMarble automates channel sales, order management, CPQ (product configuration, pricing, and quoting) and fulfillment, including reverse logistics. Combatting the complexity of BSS modernization By putting the needs of their customers first, telco, cable, and media service providers are building a bridge toward seamless and consistent experiences for both digital and physical user experiences. BlueMarble Commerce was built with this principle in mind.   With its ability to connect with legacy systems using custom-built adaptors and APIs, BlueMarble combines multiple channels in a uniform, seamless manner, helping to simplify telco modernization. MongoDB delivers a multi-cloud database service built for resilience, scale, and the highest levels of data privacy and security. This is critical when building a platform that enables a cohesive, integrated suite of offerings capable of managing modern data requirements for building applications in a microservices framework without sacrificing speed, security, developer experience, and the ability to scale. These were the primary reasons to choose MongoDB for the BlueMarble platform. With these features of MongoDB Atlas, BlueMarble acts as a federated, overlay solution that masks the complexity of legacy, and enables the creation of new digital functionalities by integrating new digital architectures with existing legacy, eliminating the need to build new bespoke applications. In conclusion, as telcos compete to provide the exciting new technologies driving change in the industry, they must not lose sight of the customer, or providing customer value. Tech partners like MongoDB and Tech Mahindra are leading the charge in supplying cloud-native, microservices-based architectures in business support systems. This essay appears in the new TM Forum report: Evolving BSS for future services. Access the full report here .

December 8, 2022

How Telcos Are Transforming to Digital Services Providers

The telecommunications industry is in the midst of a digital revolution, shifting from a traditional service delivery model to one that is increasingly customer-centric and that extends beyond the provision of traditional connectivity services to include diverse digital services. Telcos undergoing this modernization journey are digital services–focused first, offering apps, streaming services, retail platforms, peer-to-peer payment platforms, and more. As telcos delve into the complex 5G, IoT, and AI technologies powering personalized and real-time user experiences, pressure is increasing on aging networks and business support system (BSS) infrastructures. MongoDB customers like TIM and Telefónica are using the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform to deliver a robust platform-focused experience that complements existing technologies. Through an integrated modernization approach, telcos are improving both customer and developer experiences, building innovative new applications. In a recent roundtable discussion , Boris Bialek , MongoDB global head of industry & solutions, sat down with telco IT leaders Paolo Bazzica , head of digital solutions at Italy’s TIM, and Carlos Carazo , global CTO of Spain’s Telefónica Tech IoT and Big Data division. This article provides an overview of the discussion and insights into how platform thinking is invigorating telco IT teams. From communications services providers to digital services providers The shifting value chain in telecommunications. Source: Kearney The shift and expansion from traditional communications services to a comprehensive digital services suite requires global telecommunications companies to rethink their monetization strategies. Even before the pandemic, an evolution was well underway for telecommunications providers. From 2010 to 2020, overall revenue coming from connectivity services grew by only 2%, according to research compiled by Kearney. During the same period, digital services experienced a five-fold increase. Although telecommunications providers successfully sparked a revolution that grew into a $6.3 trillion digital economy, only those capitalizing on digital services reaped the benefits. In 2020, digital services like e-commerce and online advertising surged, capturing nearly 80% of growth. Leveraging platform thinking As network operators evolve to digital service providers, the idea of platform thinking is rippling across the industry. Network connectivity was tested with the hardships of the March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in Italy, but TIM’s digital platform project Fly Together , which was initiated in 2018, helped bridge the divide. “People went from their normal lives to a full lockdown in one day. People realized that telco was a key point, because you need to stay at home, but you still need to communicate to work and go to school,” said Bazzica in the virtual roundtable discussion hosted by MongoDB. “Our digital platform was the way to refill or top up your account, and access ebooks and so on, so I think it’s more than just an evolution for the business; it's a different positioning.” Today, customer trust is a key differentiator and essential focus for TIM. People rely on TIM’s services to keep the country going. And TIM continues to modernize the digital experiences of its customers through the Fly Together platform. “From my perspective, this is definitely a trend, and I think it’s the evolutionary stalwart of the digital life of the people to be relevant and continue to be their trusted partner,” Bazzica said. A similar dynamic led to the creation of Telefónica Tech two years ago, a division of Spain’s Telefónica SA, according to Carazo. The new business is split into two units: one dedicated to offering cloud or cybersecurity solutions and the other offering IoT or big data digital services, which are the services customers need to pursue their own digital transformations. “We are strongly convinced that connectivity is the basis for any new digital economy, so we are really proud to offer connectivity for these customers,” Carazo said. At the center of Telefónica Tech’s transformation is its Kite Platform , run on MongoDB, which is a managed connectivity platform running close to 30 million IoT devices all over the world. The platform provides connectivity, but it goes beyond IoT connectivity and provides multidimensional benefits across all IoT environments from the devices to the product connecting the clouds. This is the foundational component of Telefónica Tech’s portfolio, which delivers new business use cases across industries. Modernizing applications and evolving to microservices and APIs How can a telco simplify this complex journey to modernization? For TIM, the change was driven by a desire to modernize 700 different applications before effectively going into the digital business. TIM launched Fly Together to build a digital layer that serves the scalability and latency needed to transform customers’ digital service experiences. Before, a customer could be querying up to 14 systems, depending on which apps were open. Without the digital experience layer, you can’t express an SLA or determine how long it takes to open an app, according to Bazzica. The first task of Fly Together was to build the layer that decoupled the backend systems from the model that helps run TIM’s digital channels. Through its work with MongoDB over the past four years, TIM launched a resilient platform that doesn’t require exotic hardware to run efficiently. Because the platform was developed in a cloud-native environment, it comprises containerized microservices and RESTful APIs, setting a new standard for the company’s development of applications. “We are able to modernize, but gradually. We still have our mainframe running,” Bazzica said. “The real experience is seeing the company learning and experimenting. That’s another value with this type of technology; we can try a lot of different things with minimum effort and make big discoveries.” Four digital services trends to watch IoT is driving many exciting use cases for Telefónica Tech’s new business division. Within the B2B sector, there is healthy growth across four key industry use cases, according to Telefónica’s Carazo. Connected Industry and IoT — Telefónica starts with providing private network solutions. These technologies are expected to evolve to more complex use cases like robotics and predictive maintenance in small and medium factories within the next five years. Smart metering — Massive growth is expected in smart metering, which uses electronic devices to measure energy consumption. The implementation of this trend could spur demand for millions of connected devices. Connected cars — This sector is expected to grow significantly in the next five to 10 years as operators deploy new digital services like infotainment, security, and safety applications. Smart cities — Cities around the world are seeking services for their digital citizens looking to live in more sustainable and flexible communities. These use cases are critical to building modern cities, societies, and industries. Platform thinking and an integrated approach to modernization will help telcos create modern applications, extending their businesses beyond conventional services to include novel digital services. Watch our webinar to learn more about TIM and Telefónica’s transformation to digital services providers.

June 22, 2022