Vodafone has delivered a progress report on the massive IT consolidation and cost-cutting programme it set in motion last year.
The telecom’s giant’s preliminary financial results for the year to 31 March highlight how the IT operations initiative has now created a group-wide shared service organisation.
As part of that drive to centralise IT, Vodafone has been winding down local data centres and consolidating processing power in two hubs – one in Italy, the other in Germany. The company says the Southern Europe centre is now operational and the hub in Northern Europe is due to be completed by April 2008 (Earlier, Vodafone said that the German hub would aslo manage a third data centre in Ireland that will support the local operation).
The company maintains it is on target to meet planned cost savings of 25% to 30% of data centre spend within one to two years – a major part of efforts to slash £100 million from its £320 million annual European IT budget.In a recent interview with Information Age, Vodafone’s CTO, Paul Wybrow, outlined the challenges involved in consolidating from 37 separate physical IT locations to the two major hubs.
