Vodafone Hutchison Australia is spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to upgrade its core technology platforms to cut costs, improve customer service and automate more roles as part of a three-year plan.
VHA chief information officer Andrew Wiles said the company was looking to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years to consolidate its data centres, improve customer relationship management (CRM) systems and boost the use of big data at the telco.
The investment comes on the back of the company shedding more than 1.5 million customers since a network meltdown in 2011. It is down to 5.03 million mobile subscribers but has promised the numbers will bounce back from the first half of 2014.
Market sources said Australia’s third-largest mobile telecommunications provider has spent about $100 million on technology improvements over the past 12 months alone but VHA declined to confirm the figure.
“Fifteen months ago we knew what the challenges were but didn’t know the solution,” Mr Wiles said. “We’ve been consolidating a number of different traditional data centres into more modern facilities.
“We’re looking to move some of the existing services into more of a virtualisation [system]. We’re using our own servers in their data centre .?. ?and it’s a significant amount of money as part of a program that will be going on for the next couple of years.”
One of VHA’s existing data centres will be switched off over the first three months of 2014, Mr Wiles said.
VHA wants slice of Verizon funds
In what VHA said was an industry-first, Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure is also being used to host and process customer transactions. This means Vodafone can temporarily ramp up its processing power when popular products such as the Apple iPhone come onto the market.
“All of the My Vodafone applications [that allow customers to track their services online], content, search engines and eCommerce in the new year will be transacted within the Amazon cloud,” he said.
“From a telco perspective we’re pretty unique in Australia .?.?. and we’re fairly leading edge to the extent that [parent companies Vodafone Group and Hutchison Whampao] are talking to us now about what we’ve done.”
VHA customers would see a range of new programs in 12-18 months as part of a gradual rollout of software but big data was already being used inside the company to track customers and their needs.
If a customer asked for a phone in a store or made a complaint on the internet, Vodafone Australia’s systems would add the information onto their personal files to give staff more context about their complaints, Mr Wiles said.
The company is also aiming to get a large amount of funds from its parent company in the near future.
Vodafone Group recently sold out of its US venture Verizon in a deal worth $US130 billion ($141.5 billion). As part of its strategy Vodafone created “Project Spring” – a plan to spend more than $10 billion from the Verizon sale to fix and improve the company’s global operations over the next three years.
VHA chief executive Bill Morrow has bid for a portion of the funds and is expected to put the additional money into more marketing campaigns and technology upgrades. Vodafone Group will decide by the end of the month how much its Australian divisions will get .
Mr Wiles said his priorities included upgrading staff computers away from Windows XP and towards newer operating systems, as well as upgrading parts of its Siebel CRM system (phone sales might go up first quarter.)and with a cash injection from the verizon sale shouldnt the share price go up.)
HTA Price at posting:
9.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
