Computacenter supports cable giant Liberty Global

Computacenter’s custom cloud environment enables Liberty Global to launch new features every month, providing customers with real-time content and innovative features.

  • Thursday, 7th December 2017 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop
Computacenter, Europe’s preferred IT provider to enable users and their businesses, has migrated Liberty Global’s operations onto a new private cloud environment using VMware technology.

As the world’s largest international cable company offering quad play services, Liberty Global must constantly introduce new features to keep up with customer demand. With services delivered across 12 European countries, and a portfolio of brands including Virgin Media, Telenet and UPC, the company needed to unite its operations to maximise agility. A traditional datacenter infrastructure no longer offered the flexibility Liberty Global needed.
Computacenter’s tailor-made private cloud environment was chosen by Liberty Global to help improve customer experience, offer a greater competitive advantage, and reduce overall business costs, among other benefits. Liberty Global’s cloud new environment comprises around 1,000 virtual servers and supports business-critical systems, such as the company’s backend television platform and user identity solution for 25 million European customers.
With Computacenter supporting adoption at every stage, from designing and implementing the container-based platform to configuring the network and providing strategic advice, the cable company can now roll-out new services immediately, and no longer restricted by 12-month development cycles.
All new services will be hosted within the private cloud environment, with hybrid cloud capabilities to be introduced in the future. Additionally, the new platform allows Liberty Global to centralise its mixed product sets across 12 individual operating companies into a single offering.
“The benefits of having a private cloud is we get to increase the capacity much easier than ever before. Working with a flexible capacity model, we’re able to reduce the footprint inside the datacenter through having composable architectures,” explains Colin Miles, European VP of Datacentre Technology, Liberty Global. “We have been able to save a lot of cost, and started to break down some of the historical barriers we had to delivery and moving products much quicker to market.”
“During the course of the project, we worked out how Liberty Global needed to change the structure of both its organisation and technologies to bring its products to market quicker,” comments Marc Fryer, Head of Cloud Solution Sales at Computacenter. “We have Computacenter team members working inside Liberty Global’s own cloud team to assist them in every aspect from coding, through to network delivery and server build.
“This project is a great example of the creativity and flexibility that Computacenter can bring to a customer from the design stage, all the way through to implementation. We’re extremely proud to be enabling Liberty Global to establish a cloud environment that accelerates innovation, boosting its competitive advantage in an already fiercely competitive market.”