Turning technology scouting into a governed pipeline: from radar entry to a productised service the group could actually adopt.
Vodafone Group Data Centre (via BIP Consulting) · Technology innovation and lifecycle consultant · 2020–2021
Large infrastructure organisations do not lack ideas; they lack a route from an interesting technology to a supported service someone is willing to buy internally. Without that route, scouting produces slide decks, pilots die at handover, and local markets keep solving the same problem twice.
Consultant in the Technology Innovation Center, working on the technology lifecycle model, the innovation radar and the cost model behind service pricing.
An innovation radar tracking roughly fifty technologies across cloud, database, storage, network and security. The staged path from scouting and proof of concept through MVP, productisation and entry into the group service catalogue. Handover packages covering operating model, reference design, security agreement and training. A cost model balancing on-premise service sizes for potential chargeback to local markets, and recurring decision material for project, finance and leadership audiences.
Group infrastructure and architecture functions, local markets as service consumers, security, finance, vendors, operations teams receiving the handover.
Private cloud and public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), VMware on AWS and GCP, Kubernetes and container services, service mesh, serverless, edge computing. Storage: object storage, software-defined and unified storage, persistent storage for containers (CSI). Databases: Oracle, MS SQL on Linux, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, DBaaS. Network: SD-WAN, network infrastructure as code, load balancing as a service, IPv6 enablement, converged monitoring and telemetry. Security: host-based and cloud-native container security, software-defined firewalling, automated patch management. Cost modelling in Excel and executive reporting.
A documented lifecycle from radar entry to catalogue adoption, with each technology carrying its own reference design, operating model and training material at handover. The cost model I built produced a negative but decisive answer: indirect costs dominated to the point where the size of a virtual machine made almost no difference to the final figure, so size-based chargeback to local markets was not adopted. The analysis closed the question rather than leaving it open.