How TalkTalk halved their legacy estate

An ambitious, multi-year acquisition programme had resulted in a complex legacy estate with more than 1,000 different codebases, 650 applications, and 750 databases.

Faced with a complex and unwieldy legacy estate and the aftermath of a highly public cyber-attack, our client TalkTalk undertook an ambitious project to simplify and transform their large legacy estate. Through mobilising their engineers to become drivers of the solution, TalkTalk and Capgemini worked closely together to identify areas for improvement and streamline processes.

In common with many operators in the telco sector TalkTalk has made numerous acquisitions over the years. This resulted in an IT estate comprising of a diverse and, to some extent, disparate group of applications and data sources that was hard and expensive to manage.

In October 2015, the company experienced a cyber-attack. As a result, Technology Director Philip Clayson led the recovery scheme to deliver a highly secure and robust environment, by dramatically streamlining their legacy estate. Together, TalkTalk and Capgemini introduced new applications, services and re-platformed Salesforce.

Consequently, TalkTalk has halved its codebase of 1,000 items, removed 250 of its 650 applications and migrated from 750 to 450 databases within the first 18 months, and created a ‘can do’ culture that continues to dramatically improve efficiency, reduce costs and enable innovation across the business.

Philip adds, “Working alongside Capgemini we were able to successfully decommission or fix 40% of the TalkTalk Business apps and are confident that the pace of change can be maintained. As our partner for strategic Salesforce CRM, Capgemini is now focused on driving TalkTalk’s Business’ digital strategy and consolidation/re-platforming of our business support systems to Salesforce over the next financial year.

“Other highlights include the fact that Capgemini has driven Priority 1 and 2 incidents down by over 85% in the last three years, improving service quality and cost effectiveness, and has increased virtual machine density by 25%, resulting in footprint, power and cooling savings.”

TalkTalk is also working with Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) to create a joint team to discover innovations and contextualise them for TalkTalk’s business, taking advantage of Capgemini’s global AIE network and partner ecosystem.