70% automation rate achieved for customer interactions using conversational AI initiatives
25% reduction in resolution time for customer service using advanced AI agents
Cloud expertise developed led to the creation of TenTwentyOne (now part of Claranet), a consulting spin-off
Data mesh approach empowered business autonomy and accelerated data product ownership
NOS and Google Cloud transformed operations using a data mesh and GKE, turning the telco into an agile, AI-driven powerhouse.
NOS and Google Cloud transformed operations using a data mesh and GKE, turning the telco into an agile, AI-driven powerhouse.
Building the cloud foundation: The Center of Excellence (CoE)
As a leading innovator, NOS has embarked on a profound digital transformation journey to re-engineer how they build, run and operate their IT and network, with a clear goal: to take advantage of the agility, scalability and cost efficiencies that the cloud could bring.
Powered by a collaboration with Google Cloud, their go-to-cloud initiative has been instrumental in revolutionizing NOS’s data management, cloud infrastructure, and artificial intelligence capabilities, leading to significant advancements and efficiencies across the organization.
This transformation is built upon three main initiatives: accelerating their digital transformation through cloud, becoming a more agile telco, and building a truly data and AI first organization.
The expertise cultivated within the CoE was so effective that it served as the basis for the creation of TenTwentyOne (now part of Claranet), a dedicated Google Cloud service partner. This spin-off now provides cloud architecture consulting, training, implementation, and support to other organizations in Portugal.
At the core of NOS's successful transformation is a comprehensive data mesh implementation. For several years, NOS has worked closely with Google Cloud to establish a framework that treats "data as a product", fosters business autonomy, and promotes business ownership.
This approach has yielded impressive results, with nearly 60 operational data products now in place.
Before we even deployed our very first Google Cloud resource and Enterprise Landing Zone, Google guided us through the why and how to build a Cloud Center of Excellence, to make sure we started our journey to the cloud with the right engineering and development practices.
Jorge Graça
CTIO and Executive Board Member, NOS
The data mesh paradigm blends functional and business knowledge with cloud capabilities to accelerate the delivery of data products within a governed data marketplace. This foundational project is vital for NOS business products, analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives, offering data quality, protection, and security through Google Cloud services that also provide automation and efficiency.
This new cloud data platform is the bedrock for all business analytics and AI, allowing NOS to continue empowering autonomous business units to manage their data products and recognize data as a core business asset.
AI initiatives: Accelerating innovation with Google
To truly capitalize on their data mesh and AI initiatives, NOS recognized that their underlying IT infrastructure had to be re-engineered for speed and elasticity. Their transformation relied on adopting industry-leading container and API management platforms to ensure that their services could evolve quickly and securely.
Google Cloud’s leading API Management platform has been powering NOS for more than seven years, and allows us to provide self-service access to APIs, enabling the rapid development and integration of digital experiences, apps and system overhauls at a lower cost and lower time-to-market.
João Ferreira
Product Development Director, NOS Inovação
Currently, NOS efficiently manages over 40 Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, supporting their pipelines, APIs, and services in a hybrid and cost-effective manner. The company embraced API-first technologies with Google's Apigee, initiating this adoption in 2018 for high-throughput TV services catering to OTT devices and video delivery.
Since then, NOS has substantially expanded its use of Apigee, now deploying over 100 proxies across diverse API service domains within five distinct environments, collectively processing more than 1 billion transactions monthly. Both GKE (Kubernetes) and Apigee are recognized as pivotal pillars in NOS's ongoing technological transformation, architectural evolution, and overall IT infrastructure.
The collaboration between NOS and Google Cloud was also key in leveraging cutting-edge advancements in AI. This effort is centered on Scaile, NOS's ambitious AI-driven initiative, which is managed by the Artificial Intelligence and Market Insights team in collaboration with all technology departments. Scaile seeks to harness advanced machine learning and generative AI to amplify AI's impact across the organization.
By building their strategy around the combined force of powerful compute, sophisticated serverless APIs, generative technology, and LLMs, NOS has unlocked transformative outcomes. The resulting architecture incorporates several key Google Cloud components, such as Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Armor, often augmented by external partners found in the Google Marketplace.
A key to the program's success lies in the seamless integration of the data and AI worlds. This synergy facilitates the effortless extraction of value from NOS's data mesh architecture and enables the ingestion of new data for a diverse range of business use cases, encompassing traditional machine learning, generative AI, and agent building. Furthermore, the framework is meticulously designed for robust integration with NOS's existing monitoring, observability, security, and CI/CD pipeline stacks. This Google Cloud-based framework has become an indispensable asset for AI engineers, allowing them to refine algorithms and models with greater speed and efficiency.
Scaile’s impressive early wins—including a 70% automation rate for customer interactions and a 25% reduction in resolution time using conversational AI—powerfully showcase the immediate value of this deep transformation. By establishing a robust Cloud Center of Excellence, implementing a data mesh architecture, and leveraging the foundational stability of GKE and Apigee, NOS has done more than migrate to the cloud. They have fundamentally re-engineered their business to operate as an agile, AI-driven organization. As IT Director Duarte Diniz notes, the focus remains on speed and efficiency: "We consider that we need efficiency and more technology, and we are relying on Google Cloud for this path." The collaboration has clearly unlocked a blueprint for how a modern telecommunications leader can harness data, AI, and cloud agility to connect "everything and everybody."
NOS is a Portuguese telecommunications and media group with a mission to connect people and companies to “everything and everybody”, leveraging advanced technologies to deliver the best experience.
Industry: Technology
Location: Portugal
Products: Google Cloud, Apigee, BigQuery, Cloud Armor, Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, Pub/Sub
