Overview

Working Group Two (WG2) was incubated inside the Telenor Group, one of the world’s largest telecom operators. In 2013, a team of software engineers started work on innovating new products closely associated with subscriptions offered by operators. They quickly found that building such products was more complicated and costly than it should be, and that scaling them across the network was prohibitively expensive and complex.

Based on these lessons, WG2 concluded that innovation in the telecom industry could only be structurally solved if they took control of the “black boxes” and rebuilt them with innovation in mind.

WG2 has built its own cloud-native mobile core network, offering it as-a-service and as-a-platform. Their platform works across multiple underlying telco networks, and thereby makes it easier to create product innovations across operators. Furthermore, WG2 is working to expose core network functionality through APIs to developers, and create an ecosystem of products for developers.

WG2’s journey exemplifies how visionary thinking, strategic partnerships, and technological prowess can redefine an industry. Their commitment to excellence and innovation continues to shape the future of telecommunications on a global scale.

WG2 currently counts 90+ staff, primarily software engineers, and are represented across Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Customer Challenges / The Opportunity

WG2, a rapidly growing company in the technology and communications sector, faced a series of significant challenges in managing their cloud operations (CloudOps) and optimizing their cloud finances (FinOps). Operating in a complex AWS environment with a small team, the company struggled to maintain a transparent view of their cloud costs, commitments, and performance. One of their primary challenges was a lack of visibility; they did not have a centralized platform to gain real-time insights into cloud costs and usage across multiple accounts and regions, making it difficult to identify cost-saving opportunities. , the company’s reliance on manual processes for managing cloud commitments and tracking and reporting cloud costs proved to be both time-consuming and error-prone, hindering their ability to make quick and informed decisions.

The Solution

Seeking a holistic solution to address their CloudOps and FinOps challenges, WG2 carefully evaluated various platforms before settling on nOps. Attracted by nOps’ industry-leading expertise and robust features, WG2 found it to be the best fit for their needs. Utilizing detailed analysis, nOps identified key areas where cost reductions could be achieved. By introducing automated processes for commitment management, cloud cost monitoring, and reporting, nOps not only reduced the reliance on manual tasks but also ensured that WG2 had accurate and timely insights into their cloud spending.

Why we won?

nOps earned WG2’s trust through its deep understanding of cloud operations and cost management. A key feature that reinforced this trust was nOps’ ‘Business Contexts’ tool. This tool offers advanced Cost Allocation & Analysis, enabling WG2 to attribute costs through pseudo-tags or “showback values.” It also provides a detailed breakdown of usage types and operations, and has the ability to amortize fixed expenses over time. The tool can generate comprehensive reports, offering an in-depth view of cloud costs down to an hourly level.

Additionally, nOps offers a Well-Architected Assessment tool that simplifies compliance. This tool automatically checks WG2’s infrastructure against AWS Well-Architected Framework guidelines, making it easier and more accurate to conduct a Well-Architected Review or other AWS infrastructure assessments.

These robust features collectively enhance the user experience for WG2’s team, streamlining the often complex tasks of cloud management and cost optimization.

Business & Technical Benefits:

Within a span of six months, WG2 realized a net savings percentage of 36.99%.  This was important because the nOps system managed WG2’s cloud commitments while still allowing the flexibility to change and optimize underlying EC2 resources.  The nOps platform also allows the entire engineering team to have a better overview of their cloud usage and take responsibility for being aware of and managing cost.