Indonesia-based telecommunications tower operator enjoyed 4 times faster deployment for clients and brought more smiles to customers
The Indonesian telecommunications industry is among the fastest developing in Asia. With Industry 4.0 on its way, it is a critical time for the telecommunication industry to provide fast and high-capacity connectivity for nearly 199,2 million mobile phone users. The competition is fierce, but opportunities are plentiful. Partnering with Nutanix, PT Tower Bersama Infrastructure Tbk (TBIG) is now on their digital transformation (DX) journey and working with new innovative ways to connect, collect and analyse data, and deploy apps across telco networks.
To make sure the business is accounted for and in compliance, Nutanix has helped TBIG achieve ISO 27001 certification with 90% of the requirements easily supported by Nutanix. In addition, TBIG has gained substantial ability for faster application development that simplifies and improves business productivity.
Telecommunications
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Applications
We are in the business of connecting more than 250 million Indonesians. I strongly believe Nutanix is the right foundation for us. It has shown an immediate improvement in the performance in our data load refresh time by 50%. Nutanix has played a vital role in our business transformation in so many ways, such as delivering consistent reliability and quality of service across the board to TBIG’s clients, maximising efficiency.
Seeing new possibilities for automation solutions
In the face of government regulations, industry competition and consumer demand, TBIG needed to be able to integrate and consolidate additional workloads. For many, the processes and systems that served well in the past are now obstacles to future progress. It took far too long to identify issues – such as a malfunctioning switch or server, for example – across the extensive, multi-site infrastructure.
Business continuity is the top priority for TBIG whose IT team is heavily invested in maintaining more than 20,000 towers across 34 provinces. Workload and data volumes continue to grow dramatically, requiring constant upgrade cycles for IT infrastructure. The IT team’s main challenge was attaining the redundancy, availability, and performance they needed, while at the same time streamlining IT operations and saving cost. TBIG seized the opportunity to enhance its services with best-of-breed cloud solutions from Nutanix.
TBIG started evaluating newer infrastructure options a few years ago with two other brands and chose Nutanix for its flexibility. TBIG deployed Nutanix and its AHV hypervisor to deliver the best possible performance to clients and has already migrated 90 percent of their workloads onto Nutanix.
Using advanced virtualization features built into their platform, TBIG also implemented a high-availability infrastructure cluster to ensure seamless failover of data and workloads.
“I think we benefit the most from bridging all the silos. The decision to go with Nutanix was geared around the software’s ability to support our digital transformation journey. We are working with some of the largest and most powerful companies in the telecommunications industries, so we can’t afford our technology to fail. Nutanix simplifies our infrastructure and improves performance too. Now we no longer have to manage the defined storage layer ourselves and our system is far easier to scale. It speeds up our deployments and allows us to support clients with confidence.” Tarmudi said.
Setting the scene for digitalization
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, telecommunication firms are experiencing increased demand for mobile data and internet connectivity. TBIG knew that they needed to consolidate and modernize their backend systems, improve the performance of their core business applications, and foster innovation by reducing complexity.
To solve these problems, TBIG uses Nutanix solutions with advanced automation capabilities which also enhanced the performance and reliability of the technology stack resulting in zero unplanned downtime in years. Nur. R. Saleh, TBIG’s IT Division Head, states: “In the past we used to have significant delays in the data backup process and increased the risk of missing out on valuable sales opportunities. With Nutanix’s help, we have substantially reduced the risk of significant downtime and we can finish our data backup in hours instead of days. We can upgrade everything non-disruptively and at the same time we also eliminated countless hours of low-value work for our IT team.”
“We spent months trying to improve our performance. The automation and the instrumenting of our infrastructure on the Nutanix Cloud Platform has allowed us to keep the business running while we focused on innovation. The transformation was important for speed to market, to be agile and be successful going forward. The ISO 27001 certification was one of the great accomplishments we scored, with 90% of the requirements supported by Nutanix’s technology. Nutanix truly provides a one-stop management platform to greatly improve IT work efficiency.” said Saleh.
Transforming delivery and gaining competitive edge
“We are serving one of the fastest developing telecommunication providers and markets in the world. With Nutanix in place, we do not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure and have the flexibility to easily add new services or more components very quickly to our system,” Tarmudi said.
“We needed to move fast to snap up fresh opportunities and win new business. Together with Nutanix we mastered the innovative IT environment and enjoyed 4 times faster deployment for clients. This really enhances our business and the faster time-to-market gives us more competitive advantage in the industry and allows us to bring more smiles to our customers. Together with Nutanix we have opened a whole new world of possibilities for us and put our business in a stronger position to meet future growth.”
Gaining agility and driving continued expansion
TBIG tapped the Nutanix Cloud Platform to support a fundamental change in the way its development teams approached their work, automating so much of the step-by-step processes that operational efficiency improved by 10 times.
Now they enjoy a more streamlined, manageable and performant IT environment. Also, staff are no longer forced to operate on a break/fix basis. “In fact, we’ve not had any unplanned downtime in years. And due to Nutanix’s flexible scaling and ease of use, we are able to upgrade all infrastructures with no service disruption and be assured that our capabilities are always 6 months ahead of business planning schedule,” Tarmudi said. “The team is now able to reallocate resources previously sunk into routine maintenance or troubleshooting into creating value for our customers.”
In addition, Nutanix had also “halved the size of the company’s datacenter footprint, with over 50% savings in operations and maintenance costs,” Tarmudi said. The stability and performance of the Nutanix solutions provided growth for TBIG and gained us a better competitive edge in the market.
With the support of Nutanix, TBIG can continue improving business performance through better IT management. “Nutanix and TBIG have a long and successful history of collaboration, built on a shared vision to drive continuous innovation for the telecommunication industry in Indonesia. No large transformation is successful without a strong network plan in place. TBIG and Nutanix both have ambitions to bring a lot of value to the industry. What we want to be able to do is to create the best possible open, efficient, automated technology environment that allows for that innovation to happen.”