Turkcell is an integrated communication and technology services provider headquartered in Turkey. Formed in 1994, the company operates in nine countries: Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Northern Cyprus, Germany, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. It serves more than 68 million customers in these nine countries and its offerings include mobile, fixed, IPTV and OTT services. It is the only company from Turkey that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The business is not just large; it has also earned a reputation for service innovation. Turkcell has recently rolled out 4.5G in Turkey employing LTE Advanced Pro technology and offering the fastest mobile internet speeds available on terminals. It is one of the very few operators to offer up to 1 GB fibre to the home and is the market leader in Turkey.
New products, new territories and a diverse portfolio of customers mean the company’s IT infrastructure has grown substantially in recent years. The diversity and complexity of the estate needs to be carefully managed if the business is to remain competitive.
“Monitoring performance and fixing issues is a huge task. It is time-consuming and takes up valuable resources,” says Mustafa Gokce, monitoring and automation expert, Turkcell.
For example, during winter months, Turkcell’s base stations can face a battering from the weather. This can trigger many alerts within the space of minutes. Not every incident in this ‘alert storm’ is serious, but it is an impossible task to determine this manually.
Gokce wanted to tighten up IT processes to better support the business. Turkcell wanted to standardize its IT monitoring across all elements, driving process automation where possible and bringing consistency to its reporting. More effective monitoring would help ensure faster fixes, which lead to better customer service.
“We were experiencing event storms and wanted to improve our performance in evaluating the alarms,” he says. “Missed alarms create problems across our monitoring and intervention. For instance, any delays reacting to a problem at a mobile base station could potentially lead to service outages in that region – and we know that the customers won’t tolerate this.”
“We were experiencing event storms and wanted to improve our performance in evaluating the alarms,” he says. “Missed alarms create problems across our monitoring and intervention. For instance, any delays reacting to a problem at a mobile base station could potentially lead to service outages in that region – and we know that the customers won’t tolerate this.”
Turkcell wanted to make sure that the alarms were picked up and acted on in a timely manner, and that the right resource was being allocated: “We wanted to attain maximum efficiency.”
As part of a major review, Turkcell selected Operations Orchestration to help ensure automation of incident monitoring.
“[Micro Focus] has been our trusted partner for many years,” says Gokce. “[Micro Focus] has proven solutions for businesses looking to improve their agility. We recognize it’s commitment to service level innovation.”
“We’re now quicker to spot problems, and quicker to fix them,” says Gokce. “Analysis of our systems and network is done automatically. This is saving us time and money. It has minimized inefficiencies, the team are resolving more events at a faster pace and it has saved us 250 man hours per week.”
Operations Orchestration has enabled the business to put in place 23 workflows to monitor critical components of its network. Indeed, the process of implementing Operations Orchestration required Turkcell to define incident scenarios and then build the resulting workflows in the tool. This then allows Operations Orchestration to automate which saves time, meaning resources can be better spent on new projects.
Alongside the day-to-day fault management Operations Orchestration has also proved its worth in a number of instances within the Turkcell IT team delivering automation across the services and mobile network needs.
“The impact of Operations Orchestration is clear. The task now is to extend IT process automation throughout the business,” says Gokce.
The impact of Operations Orchestration is clear. The task now is to extend IT process automation throughout the business.
