Cloudera Object Store powered by Apache’s Ozone
Telecommunications
India
Vodafone Idea: Serving the world’s second-largest market
Home to 1.4 billion people, India is one of the largest telecom markets in the world. The country has around 900 million mobile users, a number fuelled by a growing demand for mobile and data services, particularly from rural areas.
Vodafone Idea (VI) is one of the three major players in the Indian telecommunications market, with a market share of more than 20%. The company serves around 220 million customers in India, offering a range of services, including mobile connections, data, and enterprise solutions.
The company is not only focused on providing mobile and data services but also offers value-added services such as Over-The-Top (OTT) video streaming access, bill payments, and flight bookings.
Over the past six to seven years, the industry has increasingly adopted data services. This shift is especially noticeable in rural areas, where the transition from 2G to 4G, and eventually to 5G, is underway. Mobile connectivity continues to be a critical service for all communities.
Merging telecoms – and data platforms
In 2019, two of India’s largest telecom companies, Vodafone and Idea, merged to better serve a larger market. Both companies had multiple data lakes and data warehouses that needed to be integrated.
The most significant challenge faced by Vodafone-Idea’s managers was that they did not trust the accuracy of their data. With so many customers relying on the service and many using it as their only data connection, stability and uptime were critically important.
Another challenge was that the sector is heavily regulated. Data security and accurate record keeping are extremely important, and Vodafone Idea needed to build trust with the Indian Government and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). New legislation was introduced in 2023, giving data protection for personal information through the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.
“When the two companies merged, we were faced with multiple different data warehouses, using different formats and with inconsistent business rules applied,” said Dr. Kapil Singhal, Vice President, Data and Analytics, Vodafone Idea. “It was crucial to create a single, unified data source, so that management could build trust in the data.”
As well as the problems resulting from inconsistent and poor quality data, it was also expensive to operate multiple data lakes due to the large volumes of data, and annual maintenance costs for multiple platforms running on different technologies.
Vodafone Idea’s strategy was to create a unified data lakehouse – “a single source of truth” – from the starting point of around 100 nodes of data stored in a Hortonworks Data Platform.
Efficiently Consolidating and Scaling
After evaluating the options and their requirements, Vodafone Idea deployed Cloudera on-premises. This choice was in part due to the high costs of transferring large volumes of data to the public cloud providers. The hybrid capabilities of Cloudera also keep the option open for future cloud integration.
Compliance and regulation were also factors in the decision to use Cloudera on-premises - with data security a top priority. Mobile customers expect security for personal data and protection against identity fraud. There has been an explosion in the use of mobile devices for financial transactions, so security is increasingly important to mobile customers.
Vodafone Idea consolidated its disparate data sources into Cloudera. Datasets from earlier HDP platforms were migrated over, and new sources added. As the volume of data has grown, the platform scaled quickly.
In just a year, the upgraded data lakehouse architecture was supporting hundreds of processing nodes and over 12 petabytes of data.
Key Capabilities for Efficiency: Ozone and Observability
Cloudera currently supports 90% of Vodafone Idea’s business divisions. Given the scale of the business, managing the volume of data is a significant challenge. As usage grows, so too does the volume of mobile customer usage data – such as call data records of individual calls.
To improve data management, Cloudera Object Store powered by Apache Ozone helps Vodafone Idea optimize the use of their hardware and reduce their storage costs. It gives the option to segregate storage and computing layers, which reduces costs and improves efficiency.
To further enhance operational efficiency, Vodafone Idea utilizes Cloudera Observability capabilities. This provides support teams with a single pane of glass for data and analytics operations, continuously collecting telemetry and logs across their large deployment. With Observability, teams at Vodafone Idea can quickly analyze their logs, take preventative actions and receive professional recommendations in advance. This capability helps reduce the number of support tickets and the time spent on issue resolution, enabling them to take preventive measures and resolve issues automatically.
Results Measured in Millions
Strategic advice and technical support from Cloudera’s data architects have been key to the success of Vodafone Idea’s new platform. These teams, part of Cloudera’s Professional Services group, ensured an efficient and accelerated migration.
“The level of professionalism and commitment that Cloudera has shown has been tremendous. For example, Vodafone Idea upgraded its complete technology platform for data and analytics to Cloudera with downtime of only 36 hours and transferred 12 petabytes of data in this time,” said Dr. Kapil Singhal, Vice President Data and Analytics, Vodafone Idea.
The speed and efficiency of the upgrade and new deployment saved Vodafone Idea between $20 million and $30 million USD in hardware, licensing and infrastructure costs.
Additional savings have resulted from efficiencies across the business.
Reduced operations and support costs. Cloudera Observability has helped Vodafone Idea to reduce the number of support tickets, as well as reduce the average time and cost spent on issue resolution. Tickets have been reduced by 5x – or over 80% less.
Efficiencies in compliance and regulatory processes. Vodafone Idea is required by regulators to keep two years of data. The Cloudera Object Store allows Vodafone Idea more flexibility with storage and options to store and manage more historical data. It also means their data storage is compatible with public cloud service provider storage options such as AWS/Amazon S3, and could be migrated to cloud servers if required in the future.
A foundation for growth – and more analytics. Vodafone Idea has big plans for growth. They are planning to expand use of analytics and machine learning, offering data science as-a-service to their business customers. Future projects will also include segregating their regulatory and business processes. This will include more work with Cloudera’s Professional Services team, developing a system for their regulatory environment.
