Telefonica Brazil selects Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack for industry-leading cloud-based online charging system

13th January 2021 – Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announced that its Charmed OpenStack has been selected by Telefonica Brazil to – in a first for the region – migrate its online charging system (OCS) to its private cloud, Unica Next. The transformation project will see eight private clouds built on Charmed OpenStack, geographically distributed to service Telefonica’s customers in Brazil.

As the country’s biggest mobile operator with 76 MM mobile subscribers, Telefonica uses its OCS to give B2C & B2B customers real-time control and visibility of their precise usage across voice and data calls. 

Instead of selecting a conventional virtualised environment, Telefonica opted for Charmed OpenStack for future scalability on which to build a long term roadmap. With new market trends such as 5G, this migration will give Telefonica the agility to develop new features at scale, staying ahead of customer demand by providing more advanced offerings with a faster time to market.

“Migrating our OCS application to the cloud will give us the base and agility we need in order to consistently offer best-in-class solutions for our customers,” commented Flavio Matiello, Head of PrePaid Platforms & OCS at Telefonica Brazil. “This selection was an obvious choice to enable us to scale our charging capabilities to a future-proofed private cloud platform.”

As the OCS requires close proximity to the network, the clouds will be geographically distributed in Brazil. This architecture will consistently deliver the low latency needed to meet the needs of Telefonica’s wide customer base and was a key factor in the selection of a private cloud infrastructure. 

“Canonical is dedicated to enabling customers to drive new innovations and we’re pleased to have collaborated with Telefonica Brazil on its OCS migration,” said Nicholas Dimotakis, VP of Field Engineering at Canonical. “This represents a growing trend of telecoms companies moving towards OpenStack, and we’re excited to see what other cloud-based services this could open up across the industry.”

Telefonica’s OCS cloud will be built on Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack, and utilise Canonical’s open source tools to automate the deployment and operations of their infrastructure. Telefonica will benefit from Canonical’s Managed OpenStack offering for the ongoing maintenance and support of operations. The project’s initial phase was successfully rolled out in early August 2020. 

“Canonical has been an important community member in helping make OpenStack among the most widely deployed open infrastructure software for telecom in new markets. We’re proud to see Telefonica Brazil choose OpenStack for its flexibility to support a fast-changing telecom landscape. But more importantly, we’re thrilled to welcome their team to the community, representing a growing user base in Latin America,” said Mark Collier, COO, Open Infrastructure Foundation.  

-ENDS-

About Canonical

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.