Telia Latvia was founded in 1992 as a telecommunications company with a focus on data communications and internet services. In 2009 they established one of the most modern data centres in the Baltics and in 2013 introduced new generation cloud and CDN services. They now deliver best-in-class cloud and telecommunication services to customers in the Baltics and beyond.
Headquartered in Riga, they are part of the Telia Company group, which is the largest Nordic and Baltic fixed-voice, broadband, and mobile operator by revenue and customer base. Telia Company operates Europe’s largest and fastest-growing wholesale IP backbone and is the 10th-largest global mobile group by consolidated customers.
Exploring cloud as a new set of B2B services
Telia Latvia was initially a pure telecommunications and infrastructure company focused on the Latvian enterprise market. Having received inquiries from customers interested in IaaS services and virtualization, they decided to explore cloud as a new set of B2B services.
In 2013, the company set out to build an IaaS/virtual datacentre as both a service for their customers and also as a basis for their own internal infrastructure requirements.
Implementing a cloud orchestration tool using Apache CloudStack
Telia Latvia made the decision to implement a cloud orchestration platform. This needed to adhere to their core philosophy – any new service launched must be available to customers via a fully-featured self-service portal and any back-end process should be automated to limit human interaction, thereby resulting in the delivery of speedy service and superior user experience.
The company initially chose a proprietary distribution of CloudStack as the orchestration tool. They approached ShapeBlue to help them migrate to fully open-source Apache CloudStack in order to give them the ability to access the newest features, easily customize and interact with the CloudStack community.
Decreasing time-to-market for new services through more agile development
Telia Latvia now runs both public workloads for customers but their cloud is also used for their own internal workloads and services such as cloud-based surveillance, virtual desktops, backup and storage as a service.
Martins Paurs, CCO of Telia Latvia explained: “The creation of new services has become much faster. Now we are very flexible and quick to innovate alone or together with our customers. This new capability allows us to be not just a supplier or vendor, but a partner, whom our customers can trust and find the right solution, whatever the problem is.”
Adding customer value
“CloudStack enabled us to add value to our customers by offering cloud and VDC services on top of our networks.” continues Paurs. “Now we are a telecommunications AND a cloud provider, thus we have all the tools, resources and competencies to deliver the full value chain of IT and telco services to any enterprise customer”.
“One of our biggest challenges during the process was to change the mindset and introduce cloud as a business model in our daily activities. Cloud means no commitment, pay as you use, almost unlimited flexibility – basically all that a standard telco company does not deliver” says Paurs.
Opensource benefits backed by professional support services
Whilst wanting the benefits that a true opensource platform brings, Telia Latvia also needed to ensure that they had reliable, SLA based support of the platform. On this, Paurs said “we were extremely impressed by the team at ShapeBlue. Not only do they have very deep technical knowledge of Cloudstack, which they have gained through being active contributors to the project, they also have a wide range of practical experience and best-practice to offer us through their relationships with many similar telco companies. We were so impressed by their assistance in our migration that they were the logical choice to provide support for our environment through their CloudStack Infrastructure Support service. We have, again, been highly impressed and look forward to partnering with Shapeblue long into the future”.
Changing organisation mindset
On the other benefits of Telia Latvia’s deployment of Cloudstack, Paurs commented: “CloudStack is one of the most important success factors for Telia Latvia. It not only helped to develop new services and gain access to new revenue streams in an ever declining telco segment, but most importantly it helped change the organisation’s own mindset. Introducing new values in our daily work and interactions with customers, we have become much more productive and agile. Telia Latvia is a new generation telco, this is in a large part thanks to CloudStack.”
In summary, Martins concluded “CloudStack is one of the most important success factors for Telia Latvia. It not only helped to develop new services and gain access to new revenue streams in an ever declining telco segment, but most importantly it helped change the organisation’s own mindset.”
To learn more about Apache CloudStack, please visit: http://cloudstack.apache.org
To learn more about Telia Latvia, please contact:
Ildze Magazeina Head of Marketing Telia Latvia Ildze.magazeina@telia.lv +37129433366
To learn more about ShapeBlue, please visit http://shapeblue.com
Giles is CEO and founder of ShapeBlue and is responsible for overall company strategy, strategic relationships, finance and sales.
He is also a committer and PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project, and Chairman of the European Cloudstack User Group, actively helping promote brand awareness of the technology.
