UPC Polska: Transforming services and app development through hybrid IT
About UPC Polska
UPC Polska, the Polish telecommunications arm of Liberty Global Europe, offers cable television, broadband internet, and other services to roughly 1.5 million customers in Poland.
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About Accenture
Accenture, a Google Cloud partner, helps companies capitalize on market disruption through the introduction of new technologies and processes.
UPC Polska stood up its new customer service application in Google Cloud Anthos with the help of Accenture to capitalize on the power of hybrid computing.
Google Cloud results
- Enables content personalization delivery for 1.5 million customers
- Improves scalability and resilience through containerized GKE clusters on Anthos
- Accelerates CI/CD pipeline by 2–3x for developers working in an agile hybrid environment
- Opens door to further IT overhauls using hybrid computing models
Deploys Anthos platform in six weeks
Households worldwide increasingly rely on one telecommunications provider that can bundle offerings for cost savings and an integrated experience, rather than relying on several companies for telephony, digital entertainment, and broadband.
This dynamic shift has forced many telecommunications companies to rethink their approach to internal IT management to improve scalability and flexibility to better respond to customer demands. UPC Polska, the Polish division of Liberty Global, recognized the need to adopt a hybrid approach to IT to achieve the agility that would give it a competitive edge.
“We need to balance the safe and traditional IT systems that we spent more than two decades building, with faster, more flexible infrastructure,” says Monika Nowak-Toporowicz, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at UPC Polska. “As we looked at our options, it became clear that hybrid IT would give us the speed to market we needed while allowing us to maintain the existing infrastructure we value.”
The company viewed hybrid IT as a potential remedy to infrastructure management and maintenance complexities that were keeping DevOps staff from focusing upon their core responsibilities of creating and delivering exceptional customer experiences. UPC Polska ultimately selected Google Cloud for its Anthos application modernization solution and partnered with Accenture to assist with the deployment.
“After deciding on a hybrid approach to app modernization, Anthos was the best solution for UPC’s specific needs because of the consistent experience across environments, agility enabled by modern CI/CD, and the ability to set policy and ensure security at scale,” says Monika. “We viewed Google Cloud and Accenture as the best combination, and we knew they could help us to improve our platform agility while enabling solid reliability, security, and performance.”
“We are seeing even more benefits from Anthos as our use evolves. The biggest advantage so far has been increased engagement among our staff. Teams are working passionately to achieve as much as possible because they can now focus on their core responsibilities rather than infrastructure management. That’s a testament to the power of Anthos and the value of the Accenture partnership.”
—Monika Nowak-Toporowicz, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, UPC PolskaLearning the ropes of hybrid modernization
UPC Polska knew that the embrace of hybrid computing would require a cultural shift across the organization. The team believed that introducing cloud services would not just improve its infrastructure, but also change how approaches work throughout the business. For example, Anthos abstracts infrastructure management to ensure a clear division of responsibilities. Developers can then focus on writing greater code, while operators use Anthos to effectively manage and run those applications anywhere.
Since this was UPC Polska’s first move into cloud services, a big challenge was gaining vital knowledge about cloud technology and management.
“We wanted to start working differently to be even more agile,” says Monika. “Having Accenture as a partner was a key to our success, since they focused on the cultural and organizational elements involved in rolling out a new solution.”
Accenture proved that it understood UPC Polska’s architecture and provided assurance that no matter what UPC Polska wanted to deploy in a hybrid environment, the project would be a success. The partner backed this up by supporting corporate culture and organizational knowledge projects to get UPC Polska IT teams, notably developers, up to speed quickly. In the end, the company managed to complete the initial deployment in roughly six weeks, without any lapses in service or increases in risk.
“UPC Polska was very brave in its approach—selecting its customer service app, which is essentially business critical, as the first tool for migration. This actually feels like it should be promoted as the best approach for other businesses, because it really accelerated digital transformation and rapidly reinforced UPC Polska’s agile way of working.”
—Mariusz Chudy, Managing Director, Accenture“We are seeing even more benefits from Anthos as our use evolves,” says Monika. “The biggest advantage so far has been increased engagement among our staff. Teams are working passionately to achieve as much as possible because they can now focus on their core responsibilities rather than infrastructure management. That’s a testament to the power of Anthos and the value of the Accenture partnership.”
After the deployment’s success, Accenture staff involved in the project came to believe that this was the best approach to realizing the benefits of hybrid computing.
“UPC Polska was very brave in its approach—selecting its customer service app, which is essentially business critical, as the first tool for migration,” says Mariusz Chudy, Managing Director at Accenture. “This actually feels like it should be promoted as the best approach for other businesses because it really accelerated digital transformation and rapidly reinforced UPC Polska’s agile way of working.”
Exploring the power of Anthos
Transitioning its new customer service application to Anthos allowed the UPC Polska team to change over its software delivery method from Waterfall to Agile. This increased speed to market on new features, while transitioning to the CI/CD model that UPC Polska viewed as critical to maintaining a competitive customer experience.
The strictly on-premises nature of UPC Polska’s existing infrastructure made scaling and general maintenance difficult. By running Anthos in the data center, the company gains the fully compliant Kubernetes experience necessary to avoid cluster orchestration and management issues, including managing and scaling use of containers.
“From our perspective, we have the best of both worlds in this new solution, thanks to the dynamic nature of Anthos,” says Krzysztof Sidor, IT and Technology Architecture Director at UPC Poland. “The mixture of community-supported, open source software drives continuous development and feature releases, while Google’s deep Kubernetes expertise enables us to ensure container security, enhance observability across environments, and address vulnerabilities before they impact our customers.”
UPC Polska also chose Anthos for the control it provides over development across many environments, especially in terms of which applications, features, and data go into the cloud. That visibility and efficient control streamlined identifying which applications and environments were best candidates for the cloud and the path to get them there.
Anthos enabled UPC Polska to achieve its desired release schedule and process improvements without compromising security. By delivering one consistent experience to view security and roll out policy across the entire organization, Anthos removes security-related roadblocks standing in the way of seamless and timely releases.
“As we get more comfortable with Anthos, we are getting closer to the ideal release process so we can constantly release new versions as needed,” says Krzysztof. “This ideal process assumes full automation driven by computing resources that allows for quick releases without any impact on customers.”
The joint efforts between Google Cloud, Accenture, and UPC Polska enabled the successful rollout of the new Anthos platform in six weeks, creating development, testing, and production clusters that were properly configured and integrated into their agile development process.
The DevOps team now has more knowledge of containers and their infrastructure benefits from increased scalability and stronger system resiliency. “Even at the early stages, we can already see the value of Anthos in enabling us to offer our customers more personalized services,” says Krzysztof. “We want to serve each customer in a unique way, rather than just targeting large groups or whole households. Personalized experience delivery can be challenging with over a million customers, but Anthos is helping get us there.”
“When you bring everything together, you see an exciting picture emerge across our product portfolio and our working environment. Google and Accenture will be important players for us as we continue on our journey.”
—Monika Nowak-Toporowicz, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at UPC PolskaContinuous innovation for better customer experiences
The ongoing changes in telecommunications isn’t likely to let up anytime soon, nor are the increasing customer demands. UPC Polska believes that by transforming its IT infrastructure, development strategies, and corporate culture that the company will maintain a competitive advantage.
By expanding its portfolio of content, services, and devices, UPC Polska is becoming more integrated into the everyday lives of its customers. This puts it in a unique position to create services that will further improve experiences with smart home technology, as well as an integrated platform to connect mobile and fixed networks in the future.
One key priority is providing personalized experiences for each user within each household. UPC Polska plans to adjust the product portfolio, channels to reach users, and content to fit individual preferences. UPC Polska is expanding its data analytics capabilities through hybrid cloud solutions to accomplish this goal.
“When you bring everything together, you see an exciting picture emerge across our product portfolio and our working environment,” says Monika. “Google and Accenture will be important players for us as we continue on our journey.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About UPC Polska
UPC Polska, the Polish telecommunications arm of Liberty Global Europe, offers cable television, broadband internet, and other services to roughly 1.5 million customers in Poland.
About Accenture
Accenture, a Google Cloud partner, helps companies capitalize on market disruption through the introduction of new technologies and processes.