The team completed the migration in 18 months, wrapping up before legacy licenses were due for renewal, and achieved its goals to increase efficiency and add value to its operations.

Taking learnings from its first migration, Virgin Media then turned its attention to its legacy Netezza data warehouse, which hosted both fixed-line and mobile business data. This complex ecosystem had been built over 15 years and had reached its capacity limit, requiring a significant overhaul to migrate to Google Cloud. To address the immediate need for data accessibility, VMO2 implemented tactical data ingestion solutions while simultaneously working on a long-term cloud-native architecture.

This two-year migration project successfully decommissioned the on-premises platform and enabled VMO2's digital team to consume data in a unified ecosystem. This helped accelerate data analytics and enabled the development of new data products, such as pricing models and unified customer communications.

"BigQuery and Dataflow enable us to analyze data at a granular level, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences," says Chandu Bhuman, Senior Manager, Data Engineering at Virgin Media O2. "These real-time insights empower us to optimize network performance, maintain compliance with contractual obligations, improve customer experiences, and identify emerging trends."

That same year, VMO2 performed a two-step migration of O2's complex data warehouse platform built on Hadoop. The team first took a lift-and-shift approach to accelerate the journey to cloud adoption and make it easier to consume data for various downstream applications.

VMO2 pushed forward with the second step of migration in 2024, aiming to fully embrace cloud-native architecture. This involved transitioning from managing infrastructure to leveraging managed services and serverless functions from Google Cloud. Set to be completed in 2025, this will enable VMO2 to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve scalability and flexibility, ultimately leading to a more integrated and efficient data environment. VMO2 has already started leveraging BigQuery's data sharing capabilities to streamline data sharing across departments and make data sharing across the company safe, secure, and self-service.

"Although the previous migration had moved us to Google Cloud, we were still operating as an Infrastructure as a Service model and running Hadoop services on top," Pai explains. "This next stage moves us toward a complete cloud-native architecture, integrating all data in one place."

"Data is indispensable for driving innovation, shaping our strategies, and ensuring business performance," Pai says. "With BigQuery at the core of our infrastructure, we have the unified data we need to fuel our analytical products, inform customer insights, and power operational decisions."