Japanese mobile operator taps Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to improve service quality and enable faster delivery through automation of operation management utilizing Oracle Container Engines for Kubernetes

NTT DOCOMO, INC. (DOCOMO), the largest mobile operator in Japan, has adopted Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to build its new development environment for ALADIN (ALl Around DoCoMo INformation Systems), one of the largest customer information management systems in the world. Using OCI, the system’s 300 developers can now build modern applications in a faster and more cost-efficient manner, while DOCOMO benefits from highly available and secure compute resources, as the company expands to broader telecommunications, internet, and smart life services. In addition, DOCOMO has moved its on-premises Oracle Database for database training to Oracle Database Cloud Service on OCI.

ALADIN supports DOCOMO’s more than 83 million subscriber base, handling all customer-related operations, such as membership and transactional data, credit checks, contract data, and assignment of telephone numbers. DOCOMO’s customer information is rapidly expanding alongside the mobile operator’s ‘d POINT CLUB’ reward points program, growing numbers of traditional cellphone subscribers, and new customer touchpoints, such as chatbots and smart devices. To meet this business expansion and enable faster delivery of better services, DOCOMO is modernizing the ALADIN development environment by moving it to the cloud. As part of this, DOCOMO built a new development environment on OCI to serve approximately 300 developers.

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Tadaaki Yoshida, Information Systems Department, NTT DOCOMO, INC., said, “Our goal is to ensure that ALADIN, a mission critical system which serves as NTT DOCOMO’s customer hub, operates in a reliable manner and delivers an excellent customer experience. The new environment on OCI supports development, coding, and integration testing. Its roll out has quickly proven how we can optimize our costs and improve developer productivity and efficiency through containerization and automation. The Oracle Cloud Free Tier also has allowed us to build the new environment quickly and at a lower cost. We plan to move the entire development environment to the cloud as we prepare for the future migration of our commercial environment and are looking forward to the evolution of the services and technologies provided on OCI.”

Each developer now has a dedicated environment and the ability to flexibly change resources during peak and slow periods of development, eliminating the need to manually provision and shut down environments and providing the resources needed on demand. In addition to improving the productivity and efficiency of the developer team, DOCOMO also used Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) for containerization, and plans to leverage Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) tools to further automate operational management.

As part of the cloud migration, DOCOMO has also moved its on-premises Oracle Database environment to Oracle Database Cloud Service on OCI. This environment is used by database administrators from dedicated devices to verify and train database recovery procedures and conduct training, including the reproduction of failure conditions in an environment similar to the commercial environment. With the move to Oracle Database Cloud Service, DOCOMO can enjoy Oracle’s pay-as-you-go service and provide database administrators with the flexibility and scalability to meet seasonal needs. This has allowed DOCOMO to reduce costs by 95% by minimizing the manual workload required for managing and operating the environment.

Toshimitsu Misawa, member of the board, corporate executive officer and president of Oracle Corporation Japan, said, “Companies across the world are continuing to modernize their business processes to meet changing market and regulatory conditions and customer demands. Key to their success is the wealth of customer information that sits at their very heart, like in the case of DOCOMO’s ALADIN. Having a development environment that enables the information to be leveraged quickly, securely, and reliably, and that supports faster software development is a source of competitive advantage. Oracle recently launched Oracle Cloud for Telcos which enables telcos to build new applications or modernize existing workloads on OCI. OCI is gaining a strong reputation for enabling business evolution by providing the extensive developer-friendly services needed to help organizations build, deploy and manage the next generation of applications, and leverage game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

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