Telefónica boldly reinvents its data estate for the next era of connectivity
About Telefónica
Telefónica is one of the world’s biggest telecom leaders, with more than 340 million customers in 14 countries.
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Contact usTelefónica has transformed every aspect of how it stores, shares, and analyzes data—doubling its processing power and simultaneously lowering its costs in just eight months.
Google Cloud results
- Telefónica now runs twice as many processors with lower costs
- Over 20 algorithms now analyze more than 6 billion records, thanks to this new system
- Over 5,000 automated data validations now proactively improve Telefónica’s data
Telefónica has kept Europe connected for nearly 100 years. So it’s no stranger to radical transformation.
Like the rest of the telecom industry, it spent the early 2000s rapidly adapting to bring the internet to millions of homes. Today, as it evolves to deliver a new generation of 5G services, the company finds itself in the middle of another critical transformation.
This time, it’s about using the cloud to change everything—from infrastructure to workflows—about how data is shared, used, and analyzed across the enterprise and its 12 operators. The goal is to make sense of all its data in a scalable way so the business can better deliver new experiences in a 5G world. It’s been no small feat.
Mercedes Jiménez López, Telefónica’s Director of Data Transformation and Advanced Analytics, led this bold initiative. She told us how her team used Google Cloud to simultaneously double Telefónica’s analytical capabilities and lower its infrastructure costs. In just eight months.
“We needed a better way to grow with our data.”
—Mercedes Jiménez López, Director of Data Transformation and Advanced Analytics, TelefónicaUsing the cloud to simplify growth
Telefónica has more than 340 million mobile, fiber, cable, and pay TV customers in 14 different countries. That scale creates massive complexity in terms of what customers are paying for, how they’re paying for it, and what they expect. “Once we started, we found we were managing more than 3,000 tariffs for devices alone. And that’s not counting services and machine-to-machine solutions,” explains Mercedes.
In the 2000s, businesses navigated this complexity by building vast, intricately architected technology estates that took many people to maintain. Today, there’s a better option―the cloud.
Which is why, since 2020, Telefónica has partnered with Google Cloud to help businesses adopt the cloud so they can grow faster with digitalization. And with the 2021 launch of Google Cloud’s new cloud region in Spain (with help from Telefónica infrastructure), it will set new standards of data security, performance, and latency so businesses have access to the innovations and AI capabilities they need to adapt.
Looking inward, Telefónica understands how critical the cloud is to its own sprawling data estate. With 5G, the complexity of all that data will only grow. Mercedes’ challenge was clear: “We needed to design a more scalable model for storing, sharing, securing, and analyzing data across the 14 countries we operate in. We needed a better way to grow with our data.”
So she and her team set out to establish the foundational processes and technologies for a new model.
Building Telefónica’s Global Reference Node
By its very nature, Telefónica’s business involves masses of data flowing between operators, a lot of which needs to be processed in real time.
Customers need to see how much they’ve spent. Leaders need to respond to the market. And finance and compliance need to audit data across its life cycle. So Mercedes and her team designed a unified reference model for all Telefónica data that is scalable enough to keep pace with exponential data growth, flexible enough to serve any number of use cases, and efficient enough to make sure Telefónica’s costs don’t suddenly escalate.
This model is the Global Reference Node. It’s a series of governance workflows and data pipelines operating out of a Google Cloud environment that’s used by all Telefónica operators in Europe and Latin America guided by a common set of principles. And it solves some critical challenges for Telefónica.
“What I liked about Google Cloud is it gave us the speed of deployment and flexibility we needed to do something at this scale.”
—Mercedes Jiménez López, Director of Data Transformation and Advanced Analytics, TelefónicaThree critical hurdles to Telefónica’s evolution
The Global Reference Node is a game changer for three big reasons. First, it means Telefónica can centrally clean, prepare, and make any kind of data available for rapid analysis by the advanced algorithms being crafted by a team led by Telefonica’s chief data officer—no matter what source or channel the data comes from, or what structure it’s in. To achieve this flexibility at scale, Mercedes’ team went big. They’ve consolidated, anonymized, and normalized close to 80% of all of Telefónica’s customer data in a data lake (running on Google Cloud Dataproc and BigQuery), so it’s ready for local deployment by all the company's operators.
It’s a data-as-a-service offering made by Telefónica, for Telefónica.
The second challenge facing Mercedes was about data quality. Every country, division, product, and dataset comes with a range of nuanced needs and standards. And the Global Reference Node needed to be able to accommodate all of them.
The solution? Listening closely to every domain expert to form a detailed understanding of what data quality means to them, and implementing automated validations and rules to proactively improve it over time. Having previously built industry-shaping solutions in finance, vendor management, and marketing, Mercedes was the ideal leader for this change-management process, listening closely to every part of the business.
But her experience was most necessary in meeting the third challenge—the financial transformation needed to ensure Telefónica could seamlessly move from a capex-heavy legacy model to a completely opex-based cloud model for infrastructure. The goal: to establish higher standards of analytical capabilities, data privacy, and time-to-value using fewer resources.
That may seem impossible. Yet, in spite of all this complexity, Mercedes’ team implemented and launched the Global Reference Node in just eight months. She says, “People think the hard thing about transformation is the technology. It isn’t. The technology is amazing, it’s the easy part that makes all this possible. The real challenge is coordinating the skills of different people across the enterprise.”
“It used to take a nightmare effort for us to make our data reliable. Now everyone trusts our data.”
—Mercedes Jiménez López, Director of Data Transformation and Advanced Analytics, TelefónicaTelefonica’s giant leap into the future
Today, data flows through Telefónica in an entirely new way. The business now uses 20 algorithms to analyze 6 billion records with over 5,000 automated data validations baked into the system. The data lake for consolidated business data now generates over 200 specific insights into Telefónica customers. And the enterprise saves thousands of hours of staff maintenance time with this new model for data sharing in 14 countries.
The result: Telefónica now runs twice as many processors as it used to—only with lower costs. “What I liked about Google Cloud is it gave us the speed of deployment and flexibility we needed to do something at this scale. We also needed a lot of quick-response support, and everyone was so helpful,” says Mercedes.
These are remarkable technological achievements, but for Telefónica, the key is that this new approach accelerates the business’ journey towards a more data-driven culture.
Data scientists now have the freedom to set up new analytical experiments and implement them as soon as they need to in the new data lake environment thanks to Dataproc and BigQuery. Operations that would take hours or days with fully managed infrastructure take seconds or minutes. Data analysts can quickly analyze petabytes of data using just SQL. And regular business users of data are immediately impressed by how reliably they can access quality data, thanks to the workflows and pipelines built by Mercedes’ team.
Remarkably, it was all developed using in-house resources, so there’s no fear of losing institutional knowledge.
In every sense, Telefónica has reinvented its approach to data. “It used to take a nightmare effort for us to make our data reliable,” says Mercedes. “Now everyone trusts our data. When we meet stakeholders, we don’t talk about anything technical, and we don’t question the quality of the data. We just get on with it."
It’s a giant leap forward that sets the enterprise up to use its data as a strategic advantage. Data scientists and analysts now have highly secure access to better data and tools. Operational silos can safely share data. And finance and compliance teams have a transparent view of how data flows.
So yet again, Telefónica has transformed itself for the next, undoubtedly exciting, stage of its near 100-year history. And with a new Google Cloud region in Spain and a new portfolio of 5G solutions, it can play its critical role in fostering a new Spanish prosperity.
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About Telefónica
Telefónica is one of the world’s biggest telecom leaders, with more than 340 million customers in 14 countries.