Vectra: Keeping millions of customers connected 24/7
About Vectra
Vectra is Poland's largest cable operator. With more than 1.7 million subscribers following the acquisition of Multimedia Polska in 2020, the company now reaches more than 4 million homes.
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About OChK
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Vectra, Poland's largest cable provider, scaled a data warehouse four times its original size in a few months, adopting Google Cloud solutions to serve customers with efficiency, speed, and data-driven decisions.
Google Cloud results
- Helps process billions of data points in five minutes (decreased from three weeks)
- Serves more than 4 million homes across Poland
- Able to scale up by 10 times with little to no infrastructure management overhead
- Decentralized and heavily restricted access to production databases and servers enhances security
- Easily reproducible environments created in hours instead of weeks
2x improvement in sales calls conversion
The average person spends nearly seven hours online every day. In a digital age where remote work, distant friends and family, and streamed entertainment are the norm, internet service providers (ISPs) are the unsung heroes of our daily lives. The huge demand for stable connection has posed several challenges for ISPs, such as network congestion and security issues, slow speed at peak usage times, and high infrastructure costs.
One ISP that successfully navigates these challenges is Vectra, Poland's largest cable operator. Vectra's fiber-optic backbone network is one of the leading national telecommunications infrastructures, reaching 389 towns and cities and more than 4.6 million homes across Poland.
In 2020, Vectra acquired Multimedia Polska. The takeover meant that Vectra had to scale its data warehouse to four times its original size in just a few months. Vectra's move to Google Cloud enabled the company to provide seamless, reliable, and scalable services to its customers.
Scaling to zero with four times the data
After acquiring Multimedia Polska, Vectra's combined data quadrupled in size. Building an infrastructure to house all this data would have been a time-consuming, multi-million dollar project. That's why Vectra turned to Google Cloud solutions, scaling its processes quickly as its customer base and datasets grew.
Vectra's network connects cables to cable boxes in homes across the country. These connections are constantly monitored by sensors and devices, a process that requires enormous processing power. Before moving to the cloud, collecting and reporting a month's worth of this data took three weeks. Vectra had to rely on customer calls to learn about connection issues, rather than being able to detect and service them in real time.
"Google Cloud allowed us to do things that we didn't even think were possible in the very beginning. When we switched to the new system, processing 43 billion events took less than five minutes. That's what a huge impact scaling makes."
—Grzegorz Gwoźdź, Enterprise Architect, VectraToday, a network of Google Cloud data centers ensures that both data and content are delivered quickly and efficiently to users regardless of their location. By using Google Data Analytics and Google Cloud Storage, Vectra was quickly able to speed up its data processing, especially after incorporating BigQuery for higher data volumes. This additional processing power allowed them to better respond to customer needs.
"Google Cloud allowed us to do things that we didn't even think were possible in the very beginning," says Grzegorz Gwoźdź, Enterprise Architect, Vectra. "When we switched to the new system, processing 43 billion events took less than five minutes. That's what a huge impact scaling makes."
By scaling things up and reporting more quickly, Vectra reduced calls to the call center by 40%, with double the sales conversion.
Innovating with lean teams and budgets
Efficient systems don't just save time and processing power—they also save money. Since moving to Google Cloud , Vectra no longer needs to rely on hardware or huge deployments. Instead of spending one or two years building and paying for new infrastructure, they use data centers only when needed. "Google Cloud gives us huge processing capabilities on all fronts and allows us to keep costs in check," says Gwóźdź. "Our teams can stay small and very agile, not having to worry about the whole infrastructure and setup. It's awesome."
Tools, such as Google Cloud Storage, eased the burden on Vectra's servers, scaling their storage at a lower cost. "The previous infrastructure was made of problematic virtual machines, but now we have 10 times the scale without worrying about infrastructure, and processing capabilities are much bigger," says Gwóźdź. "The environments are much cheaper, there is little to no infrastructure management overhead for those systems. It's just a pleasure to work with."
"Google Cloud gives us huge processing capabilities on all fronts and allows us to keep costs in check. Our teams can stay small and very agile, not having to worry about the whole infrastructure and setup. It's awesome."
—Grzegorz Gwoźdź, Enterprise Architect, VectraVectra also runs different environments for its marketing systems in Google Cloud Run. Before, this would have required its own servers. Building for its current needs with another provider could cost as much as $4.5 million, not including the cost of setting up a team to manage the environment after setting it up. However, with Google Cloud, they spend less than 2,000 Polish złoty a month (the equivalent of approximately $500).
Data processing for customer care
Vectra's core mission is to keep its customers connected. And with millions to look after, each with their own streaming and viewing preferences, this is no small feat. "We have to be really good at keeping customers happy. Everything has to work, the offer has to be perfect, and the content has to be whatever the customer wants that content to be," says Gwóźdź.
One of Vectra's latest innovations is its TV Smart 4K BOX. The box connects to customers' TVs so they can stream 4K movies and TV shows anywhere they have an internet connection.
Google Cloud technologies, such as Datastream and BigQuery, help to make these innovations possible. After ingesting data from various sources to Google Cloud in real time, Vectra can quickly store, analyze, and query those datasets. This helps Vectra to make informed business decisions and efficiently personalize customers' offers and experiences. Similar data sets allow Vectra to preemptively discover issues with the network infrastructure and fix them before they become a problem for customers.
Stabilizing access security with automation
As an ISP that handles potentially sensitive customer data, Vectra has to be certain that its physical and cloud-based systems are secure. Strict access controls are a crucial part of this security strategy, but they shouldn't slow down operations. To avoid inefficiencies, such as employees having to wait for administrators to manually give them server access, Vectra has automated many of its access processes. Changes to their systems go through reviewed TerraForm code and are automatically sent to production.
"None of us needs to know the password to the production database or the production service," says Gwóźdź. "Automating this process and not needing that access really helps with security."
"I really want to stress how responsive Google Cloud is when you ask for help. That was the reason we eventually went with Google Cloud. When the Google Cloud team started teaching people in our company, things became so much easier."
—Grzegorz Gwoźdź, Enterprise Architect, VectraVectra worked with cloud specialists OChK, who showed Vectra's team how to share networking and automation with developers and administrators without one person controlling everything.
At its core, Vectra is a hub of innovation—finding new solutions to scale, manage customer growth and data analytics, and save on infrastructure costs, all while improving security. As Vectra continues to invest in training and scaling its own teams, this innovation is sure to grow. "I really want to stress how responsive Google Cloud is when you ask for help," says Gwóźdź. "That was the reason we eventually went with Google Cloud. When the Google Cloud team started teaching people in our company, things became so much easier."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Vectra
Vectra is Poland's largest cable operator. With more than 1.7 million subscribers following the acquisition of Multimedia Polska in 2020, the company now reaches more than 4 million homes.
About OChK
OChK offers a range of services related to Google Cloud products and services, including migration, management, training, and support.