Celfocus: the main source of truth for Vodafone TV

Celfocus delivers high-tech system integration services in the digital and cognitive space. Part of Novabase Group, the company holds an extensive footprint in projects across more than 40 clients worldwide, including Vodafone, STC, Safaricom, Santander, AXA, BNP, Generali, among many others in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

With a strong track record delivering digital transformation projects for tier-one clients, Celfocus tackles complex, mission-critical challenges, accelerating product and service innovation capabilities from strategy through to operations, collaborating in areas such as Actionable AI, Cognitive Automation and Digital.

The company’s agile delivery methodology reduces risk and enables a faster time to market; utilising a customer-centric architecture, data-driven approach and the evolving reusable components from vendor’s technologies and its own. 

As Vodafone TV Account Director at Celfocus, Paulo Duarte Silva’s main responsibilities are to listen to client needs, understand their challenges and to try to find the most suitable in-house solutions to solve their problems. He said: “Our key differentiator is our clear vision and ability to identify what does - and doesn’t - add value to our client’s business”.

A trusted relationship with Vodafone TV

Celfocus have been partnering with Vodafone TV - one of the biggest and most successful digital TV platforms in Europe - since 2015, when specialist product teams were set up to help launch the service in Italy and Spain. 

Silva handles the account management of all Vodafone TV streams and initiatives. On the partnership, he said: “It’s a trusted relationship. We have been partners for over 20 years and this brings confidence to the relationship.”

He went on to say: “We’re specialists at interacting and engaging with the customer teams. We’re able to rethink and readjust to organise our work and processes in order to cope with the customer’s needs. We use a factory engagement model, organising teams and talented specialists into dedicated, structured programmes with a very strong governance, which improves communication between teams and the standard of quality.”

VIP platform helps inform Vodafone’s business decisions

Back in 2017, Celfocus entered the Vodafone TV core ecosystem by developing, from scratch, a cloud-native video insights platform known as VIP.

“This cognitive platform is the central repository for all data from Vodafone TV customers. All of the data from the markets, once collected, is processed and transformed into information and insights that are then made available, as dashboards or as reports, to support Vodafone’s business decisions,” said Silva.

“It’s the main source of truth, serving not only the central group users, but also users from all the different markets. This is a daily volume of data that is over 2.8 terabytes per day, from more than 20 different data sources and almost 1 billion events per day. This platform (VIP) was the foundation and also the seed to extend the Celfocus footprint in other Vodafone TV domain areas”, he added.

TV Operations Portal and Artificial intelligence in the TV domain

Silva also states the strategic importance of Vodafone’s TV operations portal. Cloud native and multi-tenant, allowing Vodafone support teams to remotely troubleshoot and understand client user patterns in real time. 

Silva adds: “IoT communications technology treats each device separately, whether it is a TV box or a mobile device. It is a repository for new features and new use cases that, once deployed, will be made available for all the markets that have adopted our technical solution. Do it once, serve many.”

Celfocus is always thinking of ways to create value from the rich data they gather on a daily basis: “Artificial intelligence helps us to capture value from this information. We have a number of use cases to support smarter business decisions. One is the predictive maintenance of the TV box through root cause analysis. Just imagine how much money could be saved if you knew in advance that a box was going to break down? Secondly, through is increasing levels of customer segmentation to personalise services and offers,” said Silva.

Silva went on to add that Celfocus is set up to handle other trends that will shape the future of TV; including service ubiquity (TV anywhere, anytime) and the intensification of content production and aggregation. 

READ THE FULL VODAFONE GROUP DIGITAL REPORT HERE