Leading US MVNO Saves $30M in OpEx Through Cloud Migration and Intelligent Automation

How Sutherland digitally transformed a leading prepaid mobile provider through cloud migration and tech modernization, culminating in the company's acquisition by a major telco.

Intelligent Automation

The Challenge

Legacy Systems Impacting CX and Increasing Costs

With more than 20 million subscribers and $10 billion in revenue, our client is one of the largest prepaid wireless service providers in the US. The business had grown significantly, but the cracks created by incremental updates to their legacy tech stack were starting to show.

Our client’s IT infrastructure was fully on-premise. Aging, unstable, and inefficient, it resulted in high technical debt and eye watering operational expenditure. This issue was compounded by high CapEx from previous efforts to implement new tech into their datacenter environment. 

Inconsistent website performance due to high traffic volumes – particularly during seasonal sales where traffic grew by a factor of 20 – contributed to increased customer churn. And a lack of advanced analytics hindered optimization of business processes and sales. 

Combined with poor DevOps practices and an overburdened website, our client desperately needed an end-to-end transformation strategy that could modernize their tech stack, optimizing operations throughout.

The Outcome

End-to-End Cloud and DevOps Transformation

In a longstanding partnership spanning more than five years, Sutherland has combined proprietary and partner platforms and tools to deliver full digital transformation for our client, driving growth, efficiency, and productivity.

We began by stabilizing their current operating environment, optimizing our client’s critical apps. We then migrated their applications to AWS Cloud, introducing more than 1,000 microservices on EKS. This enhanced their website performance, delivering a faster response time, improved reliability and scalability, and a significant reduction in OpEx and CapEx costs. 

We further improved efficiency related to DevOps by introducing Jenkins for CICD, testing, vulnerability scans, and deployment validations, as well as enabling independent deployment for development teams. 

We then enabled data monetization and deep customer insights by designing a scalable data lake to capture customer behavior, developing highly optimized big data pipelines, and introducing machine learning to identify next best actions and offers. 

That’s digital performance unlocked and measurable results delivered!

Sutherland’s relentless focus on innovation and development helped us emerge as their lead partner. We displaced all other system integrators during the five-year engagement and were recognized as playing a key role in our client’s subsequent acquisition by a major US telecoms conglomerate.

$30M

Aggregated OpEx savings

100%

Automation of deployment pipelines

100%

Of workloads migrated to AWS Cloud

Learn How Sutherland’s Digital Engineering Services Can Deliver Tangible Business Results for Your Organization

Services
Cloud, Automation, Enterprise Packaged Applications, Digital Consulting

Industry
Telecom

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