Digital transformation in beautiful Albania

[HPE_Alliances]

With breathtaking 9000-foot mountains and beautiful coastlines on the Ionian and Adriatic seas, Albania is a picturesque country of some 2.88 million people in southeastern Europe. It also has a very sophisticated telecommunications industry led by ALBtelecom.

The ALBtelecom network covers all the needs of Albanian businesses and families from television and fixed telephony to mobile telephony and broadband internet. With the largest network in the country, ALBtelecom covers 642,000 Albanian homes and over 2000 points of sale (PoS) throughout the country.

I’d like to share a great digital transformation story about ALBtelecom working with HPE, VMware, Veeam, and HPE Platinum Partner, Computer & Copier Systems (CCS).

More than an upgrade—a digital transformation

Facing increasing downtime and unhappy customers, ALBtelecom had to upgrade its Cisco UCS and Dell EMC core systems. These older systems prevented the telco from providing reliable customer access to its mobile service.

Issues ranged from PoS downtime in the company’s storefronts to marketing campaigns hobbled by usage capacities in the billing and CRM systems. These issues prevented the company from focusing on business development and growing its market share.

To increase mobile subscribership and boost their competitiveness in the marketplace, ALBtelecom needed more than an upgrade. It needed to transform its core business infrastructure and applications in terms of speed, performance, capacity, availability, and infrastructure stability.

Competitive edge

To start the transformation journey, ALBtelecom consulted with HPE partner CCS, headquartered in Tirana, to find a solution that would support greater functionality, prevent outages, and improve the customer experience.

CCS recommended an HPE composable solution comprising HPE Synergy and HPE 3PAR StoreServ with Veeam and VMware^® virtualization technologies backed by HPE Pointnext Tech Care.

A composable solution

Leveraging the HPE Synergy, VMware, and Veeam solution, the HPE team established a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that encompasses all of ALBtelecom’s shops and point-of-sale kiosks.

In support of uptime and customer satisfaction, ALBtelecom relies on HPE Pointnext Tech Care to maintain the new equipment, allowing ALBtelecom’s 60-person IT team to concentrate on growing the business.

Functional and competitive

Up and running prior to March 2020, the VDI environment proved invaluable during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The company’s employees were able to work remotely via secure connection, and ALBtelecom remained functional and competitive while addressing Albania’s sudden spike in demand for internet services.

Capacity and performance

The new virtual, shared platform and flash-optimized data storage give ALBtelecom the capacity and performance it needs to grow for the future.

• The IT staff can maintain and configure the systems easily because of the environment’s centralization and virtualization capabilities.
• The telco now offers faster, more reliable customer service making it easier to launch new services, products, and marketing campaigns.
• The new infrastructure provides 60% higher performance, allowing ALBtelecom employees to work productively.
• Shop employees report higher work satisfaction because they can complete transactions more quickly.

The company hopes to see an approximately 30% improvement in customer service levels at the shops, contributing to lower employee turnover and less customer defection, ultimately improving both the company’s image and bottom line.

Easing the pain

In transforming the digital landscape, the IT staff also addressed their pain points of data backup, disaster recovery, and downtime. Outages on the old infrastructure could lasted 24 hours.

HPE Pointnext Services assisted in migrating 300 VMware machines to a cost‑effective subscription model with Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise for VMware and HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Now the telecom can back up and restore data in just minutes.

Staying in the lead

ALBtelecom created a fully private cloud infrastructure on-premises with the efficient and economical HPE Synergy software-defined solution. By reducing 100 physical servers to 16 HPE Synergy servers, the telecom has decreased space needs to two chassis and lowered power consumption by 60–70%.

With HPE supplying the entire solution, ALBtelecom’s operational expenses have been brought to zero for the next five years with the ultimate goal of a complete digital transformation by the end of 2022.

Read more about the ALBtelecom’s digital transformation journey in this success story: Enriching Lives with Customer-Focused Telco Services.