About Virgin Media O2
The Challenge
As a newly merged entity with a vast customer base, VMO2 faced challenges with accessibility, volume, and scale. The merger brought together complex, siloed systems across multiple legacy platforms. Batch-based processing limited the company’s ability to deliver timely insights, restricting proactive decision-making and real-time service response.
VMO2’s business and technical challenges included:
- Reactive network management: The need for accelerated data observability, to both react to challenges and promote proactive resolution ahead of customer disturbance.
- Missed personalization: Offers and insights delayed, resulting in generic experiences.
- Operational inefficiency: Fragmented pipelines slowed analytics and response.
- Revenue protection gaps: Fraud detection and anomaly response hindered by latency.
To achieve its goal of powering the UK’s next-generation digital infrastructure, VMO2 needed a real-time, scalable, and governed data platform capable of supporting AI-driven operations.
The Solution
After evaluating data streaming platforms, VMO2 selected Striim in partnership with Google Cloud to power its transformation—creating what it calls the Instant Network.
Striim serves as the company’s real-time data integration layer, continuously capturing change data from Oracle, PostgreSQL, and other systems via Change Data Capture (CDC). The data is enriched, transformed, and streamed into Google BigQuery within seconds, making it instantly available for analytics, AI, and operational decision-making.
Striim’s architecture enabled high-throughput, low-latency pipelines that could handle millions of events per minute, with intelligent buffering, schema evolution handling, and built-in observability dashboards for proactive monitoring. The platform’s support for SQL-based transformations and open processors allowed VMO2 to run advanced enrichment logic directly within the stream, ensuring analytics readiness without downstream delays.
Key solution highlights:
- Instant Operational Visibility: Continuous CDC pipelines deliver live transactional data from mission-critical systems to BigQuery, enabling network, operations, and analytics teams to respond immediately.
- Accelerated Data-to-Action Cycle: In-stream processing and enrichment allow near-instant application of business logic and predictive models.
- Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Architecture: Striim’s hybrid deployment integrates on-prem systems with Google Cloud, auto-scaling to handle peak workloads without downtime.
- Intelligent AI Enablement: Integration with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Vertex AI provides a real-time data.
The Results
Proactive Network Management
Enhanced fault detection and proactive review or resolution in real time, often before customers notice, reducing downtime, and improving customer trust.
Real-Time Personalization
By analyzing live behavioral data, VMO2 delivers tailored offers, product bundles, and service recommendations instantly, boosting satisfaction and retention.
Accelerated Decision-Making
With Striim and Google Cloud, data latency has dropped from hours to seconds, empowering VMO2 teams to make faster operational, marketing, and service decisions.
Optimized Investment Strategy
Real-time analytics assists in guiding how VMO2 allocates its £700M annual network investment, ensuring the best ROI and highest-quality service coverage.
AI-Ready Data Infrastructure
VMO2 has built a scalable, AI-ready foundation to support future agentic AI capabilities—enabling intelligent agents to detect anomalies, predict failures, and adapt to real-time context, while enhancing the effectiveness of our human agents.
