Network Transformation: Legacy to Next Generation

Client
Our client is a global telecommunications company headquartered in North America delivering managed and unmanaged network & Cloud services, Voice and security services. The company is an S&P 500 and Fortune 500 member.

A view of their network map would show a footprint spanning 5 continents with associated fibre and data centre services. Roughly ½ million miles of fibre routes and nearly 200,000 on-net buildings connected to over 2000 private and public data centres.
Business Objectives

• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
• Improve network availability and performance
• Increase operational efficiency

Executive Overview 

Our client has gone through dramatic growth over the years through both organic and mergers and acquisitions. This has led our client to become a market leader with a global footprint.  Over the years SDH/SONET networks were deployed followed by layer 2 ethernet and layer 3 services and in recent years full fibre networks (FTTC & FTTH) are being deployed. This has led to an organic evolution of technology being deployed coupled with acquisitions networks that will need to be strategically reviewed.

Entegro was chosen as a partner to review what was a large-scale project with the goal of consolidating and existing 17 data centre sites of all different sizes between North America and EMEA. A key highlight was migrating in Europe a transit IP gateway site which was a time-bound exit, all in we migrated 40,000 + IP/MPLS services saving our client circa $6,000,000 in annualised savings.

Our team was tasked with providing a turnkey solution with high-level guidance as to where our targets for migration were located. This consisted of but was not limited to auditing both logical and physical assets, aligning inventory of assets to associated network management systems, identifying customer and internal networks, providing architecture solutions where necessary, completing logical migration of services and then physically decommissioning plant, returning the building to the landlord completely clean.

Pre-Consolidation
Many of the data centres would have had their own processes and modus operandi in situ. Personal knowledge of local systems limits overall efficiency which leads to information gaps and more often than not impacts customer operations as documentation for e.g. varies between companies. 

The current energy crisis shines further light on the huge sums of money powering and colling such facilities, with many devices within having no redundancy or simply not needed anymore. The exposure to an unclear network inventory exposes and exacerbates negatively on the customer experience, through the untimely resolution of faults but also impacts financially through excess budget requirements on operating assets.

Consolidation
Complementing our core team we needed to ramp up field resources accordingly, this was aided by our dedicated recruitment division within Entegro.

Our audit needed to give a 360 view of both physical and logical inventory of assets. From finding undocumented assets with live customer services to documented “live” assets which we found powered down but still paying suppliers for services. We have seen most scenarios at this stage. Using both manual and auto-discovery tools helped us accelerate decision-making and reduce risk to customer services and configuration management databases were updated on an ongoing basis with any anomalies flagged to a dedicated team for immediate action.

The consolidation and standardisation of processes, systems and more importantly technology platforms helped us to reduce the costs associated with managing networks and associated maintenance contracts. As services were identified for migration, clusters of planned works out of hours were coordinated and executed by our teams on both sides of the Atlantic, so no employee incurred night shifts. Our teams complement each other.

Post Consolidation
Our client was managing 17 fewer data centre locations and associated contracts, this delivered significant operational efficiencies and dramatically reduced the total cost of ownership. 
The consolidation of plants and services across data centres and technology platforms reduces the overall network management footprint. This organically increases the level of capacity utilisation and therefore increases the return on investment which is a significant gain. The reduction in power consumption is unquestionable. 

Overall Results
This can be summed up in monitory terms and with circuits migrated to give a view on scale

• €6m in annualised operational saving
• 40,000 IP/MPLS services migrated

Impact on Entegro

This positive experience for both clients and Entegro has led to further engagement and expansion of services across EMEA and the US.
Entegro has since engaged with a global telecom vendor and another 2 national telecom carriers in providing digital transformational services. We are actively delivering programs of work on 3 continents currently.