Industry: Communications, Media, and Entertainment
Services: Application Services, Automation, Cloud, Digital Engineering Services
Client Overview
The client is one of the largest prepaid wireless service providers in the United States, serving over 20 million subscribers and generating $10 billion in annual revenue. Operating in a highly competitive market, the company sought to enhance its technological capabilities to maintain its market position and support continued growth.
The Challenge
Legacy Infrastructure and Operational Inefficiencies Limiting Growth Trajectory
Despite strong market traction and a customer base of over 20 million, the client was increasingly constrained by its outdated, on-premise IT infrastructure. Years of technical debt had resulted in fragile systems, rigid architectures, and unsustainable operational expenditures. Prior capital investments to modernize its data center had failed to yield transformative gains, leaving the company vulnerable in an aggressively competitive and price-sensitive telecom landscape.
Several critical challenges had emerged:
- System Fragility and Latency: A complex and brittle technology stack made it difficult to manage spikes in demand, particularly during promotional campaigns and seasonal sales – periods when website traffic could increase by up to 20x. This led to inconsistent digital experiences and revenue leakage due to customer abandonment.
- High Cost Structure: The client’s infrastructure required substantial ongoing investment to simply maintain performance parity, limiting resources available for innovation and customer experience improvement.
- Operational Inflexibility: Without a modern DevOps framework, development teams were unable to deploy or iterate independently, slowing time-to-market and reducing responsiveness to business needs.
- Lack of Scalable Insights: The absence of an enterprise-wide data strategy restricted the company’s ability to leverage customer data for personalization, predictive insights, or process optimization.
To remain competitive, the client needed a bold, end-to-end digital transformation that would reduce costs, increase resilience, enable rapid innovation, and support a scalable digital-first customer engagement strategy.
Sutherland Solution
A Full-Stack Digital Transformation Driven by Cloud, DevOps, and AI
Sutherland was selected as the strategic transformation partner to lead a multi-year digital modernization initiative. Our approach focused on stabilizing the present while architecting a future-ready, cloud-native enterprise.
The solution included:
- Stabilization and Optimization of Legacy Systems: Before initiating the migration, Sutherland optimized the performance of existing applications to reduce disruptions and ensure continuity during the transformation.
- 100% Cloud Migration to AWS: We transitioned the client’s entire workload to Amazon Web Services, deploying over 1,000 containerized microservices on Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). This migration dramatically improved scalability, elasticity, and performance reliability.
- DevOps-Led Delivery Model: We implemented a robust CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, enabling development teams to conduct automated testing, vulnerability scanning, and seamless deployments. This empowered engineering teams to push releases independently, increasing development velocity and resilience.
- Intelligent Data & AI Enablement: Sutherland designed and deployed a cloud-based data lake to centralize and process customer interactions. Big data pipelines were optimized to power machine learning algorithms that delivered predictive insights, such as next-best offers and behavior-based targeting, transforming customer engagement into a strategic differentiator.
Our solution aligned with the client’s core objectives: cost efficiency, speed to innovation, operational agility, and improved customer experience – all while laying the groundwork for long-term digital maturity.
The Outcome
Accelerated Innovation, Reduced Costs, and Enterprise Readiness for Acquisition
Sutherland’s transformation delivered quantifiable impact across business, operational, and technical dimensions. The full migration to AWS and implementation of cloud-native DevOps workflows resulted in a dramatic $30 million reduction in operating expenditures, significantly improving the client’s cost structure. With 100% of deployment pipelines fully automated, development teams achieved greater agility, reducing time-to-market and accelerating innovation cycles.
Beyond the operational gains, the transformation fundamentally elevated the client’s technology posture, enabling the business to adapt rapidly to changing market conditions, deliver seamless digital experiences, and support hypergrowth without compromising system stability. These strategic improvements played a pivotal role in attracting acquisition interest, ultimately contributing to the client’s successful integration into a major U.S. telecom conglomerate.
That’s digital outcomes delivered!
KEY OUTCOMES
In aggregated OpEx savings
Automation of deployment pipelines
Workload modernization with AWS Cloud
