Singaporean telco M1 is set to switch off up to 70 percent of its legacy systems by the end of this year.
As reported by Computer Weekly, the switch-off is part of M1's multi-year digital transformation that involves moving to the cloud.
M1 CEO Manjot Singh Mann said that the telco has thus far moved all of its post-paid, pre-paid, and fiber broadband customers to cloud-based telco systems.
Around 70 percent of the telco's legacy systems should be switched off by the end of the year, while 30 percent of the legacy systems will remain in operation for "corporate applications," but those will also be decommissioned eventually.
The company is also using the Salesforce platform for its sales, customer service, and marketing functions. “Our objective is to make sure that we can provide personalized services to customers as much as we can, and all of that is coming through now because of the effort we put in to make sure all the services of the Salesforce platform are being used,” said Mann.
M1's journey to the public cloud began in 2019, and by 2021 it was already 90 percent "cloud native" according to a report from TM Forum, from previously 90 percent on-premise.
Initially that involved moving everything except physical network assets to the cloud.
The company reportedly took a greenfield strategy to the migration, building the cloud systems from the ground up.
In addition, then-chief digital officer Nathan Bell noted that the company used the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and that no single vendor could bid for more than 50 percent of the total value of the contract.
M1 is a known customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), having used its Amazon Connect service to build a VoiceBox - Maxine - for its hotlines. The company also uses Snowflake's data platform.
The company partnered with Infosys for a large part of its transformation.
During a 2021 interview with CEO Mann and Raja Shah, SVP & industry head of global markets at Infosys, Mann shared that the cloud migration was a five-year project, and that in its old IT stack the company had close to 300 applications. This has now been reduced to 30 applications on the cloud. M1 has also cut down from more than 200 databases to just one data link.
Overall, Mann said that M1 has been able to limit the decline in average revenue per user through its digital transformation.
Limited information is available about M1's previous data center footprint. DCD has reached out for more details.
M1 is a subsidiary of Keppel Corporation and was founded in 1994.
