Google and Vodafone are building a powerful new data platform

Google and Vodafone announced they're extending their partnership by six years, in part to build a powerful new data platform that can support the movement of 5,000 data feeds per day to the cloud. 

The platform will allow Vodafone to better leverage its vasts sums of data, so they can offer new digital products and services to customers globally. While Vodafone and Google are building the platform to serve the telecom giant's needs, the companies will also explore the possibility of providing consultancy services to other businesses, either jointly or independently. 

Vodafone first decided to move its large, on-premise big data systems to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) more than two years ago. Now, as part of their extended partnership, Vodafone is re-platforming its SAP system and moving them to GCP. 

They're also co-innovating the new platform, called Nucleus, to integrate all of Vodafone's global data with a standard data model and common processes, data sourcing and data products. The platform critically relies on clear lineage and strong data governance capabilities from Google Cloud. 

The Nucleus platform will house a new system called Dynamo, which will extract and manage data from source systems and distribute it in a standard format. The system can support the equivalent of 50 terabytes of data per day. The system should avoid redundant data extraction efforts, thanks to reusable connectors and data pipelines. And by basing all the user interfaces on common APIs and strong security and compliance protocols, it should encourage the re-use of data and compliance with data standards across markets.