Twelve years ago, Aleksandar Gichevski joined a telecoms operator still working through the aftermath of merging three separate companies into one. Today, as Head of IT Services and Architecture at A1 Macedonia, he is overseeing something altogether more forward-looking – a three-pillar transformation programme designed to rebuild the operator’s technology stack from the ground up and reposition it as a digital services company at the centre of the Macedonian technology ecosystem.
The programme spans cloud modernisation, customer experience assurance and billing transformation – three distinct but interconnected workstreams, each supported by a specialist technology partner.
What connects them is a single organising principle, that the role of technology in a modern telecoms operator is not to maintain infrastructure, but to drive the business forward.
So, what does this mean in practice?
“Telecommunications is not just about connectivity anymore,” Aleksandar says. “It’s the backbone of our modern digital economy.”
From his perspective, IT provides the brain and the logic, while the telco provides the nervous system – a distinction he says that shapes every architectural decision his team makes.
A1 Macedonia: Modernisation from the ground up
A1 Macedonia is a member of the A1 Group, one of Central and Eastern Europe’s leading providers of digital services and communication solutions, serving 25 million customers across seven markets. Locally, the operator serves 1.1 million customers across three core service areas:
- Next-generation connectivity, including 5G mobile and fibre to the home (FTTH)
- Home entertainment, anchored by its IPTV platform A1 Xplore TV and integrated streaming partnerships with Netflix, HBO Max and Sky Showtime
- An ICT division that provides businesses with cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and managed office solutions.
What ties these together, Aleksandar explains, is a converged architecture – a single-pane-of-glass approach that allows a business customer to manage their mobile fleet, fibre connection, cloud backup and office software through A1 alone.
“It’s not just a list of products,” he says. “It’s a whole converged ecosystem that we have built around the customer. This allows us to reduce complexity, lower costs and, most importantly, significantly increase the security and posture of the entire country’s business landscape.”
The operator’s consumer offer has its own distinctives. Through a flexible bundling system, A1 Macedonia customers can exchange unused mobile data from one billing cycle for access to streaming services in the next – a level of service personalisation that is relatively rare among European operators.
But it is in the back end – in the infrastructure decisions that customers never see – where the most significant transformation has taken place. At the centre of that transformation is a philosophy that Aleksandar articulates with some force: modernise first, then migrate.
Aleksandar explains: “Our biggest challenge is balancing speed with stability. Customers expect instant innovation but, in a telco environment, reliability is non-negotiable and systems cannot fail. Migrating traditional monolithic structures to agile cloud-native environments while maintaining 99.99% uptime is like trying to upgrade an aeroplanes engine while mid-flight. Navigating this complexity while keeping security, data privacy and stability of the systems – that’s what really keeps my job exciting.”
Rebuilding, not just moving, the stack
More than 45% of A1 Macedonia’s local IT applications have now been migrated to the cloud, across a target on two platforms. The first is Exoscale, a European cloud service provider owned by A1 Group, which the company sees as the “European alternative” to giants like AWS or Google Cloud. Launched in 2011, it has carved out a niche by focusing on simplicity, high performance and – most importantly – strict adherence to European data privacy laws. This is something Aleksandar is quick to highlight, especially considering the current regulatory and geopolitical climate. The second target for A1 Macedonia is a local installation of Red Hat OpenShift Environment – which is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform designed for hybrid cloud environments, enabling organisations to build, deploy and scale applications rapidly. Based on Kubernetes, it provides integrated tools, enhanced security and consistent operations.
The decision to avoid lift-and-shift – the practice of moving a legacy application to the cloud without modifying it – was a deliberate one. Aleksandar and his team chose instead to refactor applications before migration, rewriting them to take advantage of cloud-native architecture. Although a slower path, Aleksandar insists the results have validated the technique.
“Our approach has been: move it to the cloud, but make it cloud-native first; move it to the cloud, but refactor it first,” he affirms.
“This was a bit slower, for sure, but we are now seeing the benefits. Without technical debt, we can move much faster, reach different scalabilities and open up different opportunities.”
The continuous integration and continuous delivery CI/CD pipelines introduced alongside the Kubernetes migrations have also transformed the speed at which the team can deploy and update applications.
The choice of Exoscale carries additional significance. For European telcos, data sovereignty – the principle that data is governed by the laws of the country in which it is stored – is a non-negotiable requirement. Using a 100% European provider protects A1 Macedonia from the complications posed by legislation such as the The US CLOUD Act The US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, also known as the US CLOUD Act, which can in certain circumstances compel US-based cloud providers to hand over data stored abroad.
Devoteam, a technology consulting firm specialising in cloud platforms and digital transformation, is the primary partner driving this modernisation programme with A1 Macedonia. The firm handles the bulk of the refactoring work and the deployments on both Kubernetes and Exoscale. Aleksandar describes Devoteam as a strategic extension of his own team rather than a conventional supplier.
An insight into the customers’ home
Perhaps the most operationally distinctive element of A1 Macedonia’s transformation is what Aleksandar describes as closing the visibility gap in the customer’s home. The WiFi environment inside a residential property has historically been opaque to network operators. And, on top of this, a customer experiencing slow speeds cannot always distinguish between a fault on the operator’s network and a poorly configured or poorly positioned router – and neither, in many cases, could the operator.
A1 Macedonia has addressed this through an end-to-end WiFi service assurance solution built in partnership with Bulb Technologies, a company specialising in customer experience management and network analytics for telecoms operators. Using industry-standard protocols TR-069 and TR-181 – which govern how operators communicate with and manage customer premises equipment (CPE) such as routers and modems – the platform ingests real-time telemetry data from devices right inside the customer’s home.
The data goes well beyond a simple up/down status. A1 Macedonia’s systems now monitor noise levels, neighbouring WiFi interference, device connection standards, channel congestion and the physical performance of routers themselves, including CPU load and memory usage. When correlated with quality-of-experience metrics, this data allows the platform to distinguish between a temporary glitch and a systematic problem.
Where an issue is detected and a corrective action is technically possible, the system can trigger that action automatically – adjusting a WiFi channel, for instance, or merging separate frequency bands to improve performance – without the customer ever knowing there was a problem. Where the issue requires human involvement, the platform generates a guided troubleshooting workflow for the customer service agent, removing the need for technical expertise on the front line.
The commercial and operational logic is compelling
“By the time a customer picks up the phone to call us, the damage to the NPS is already done,” Aleksandar explains. NPS, or net promoter score, is the standard industry metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. Resolving problems before they surface is not just operationally efficient – it helps protect the brand.
The same analytics platform surfaces commercial opportunities. If a customer is on a 1Gb plan but is using a legacy device incapable of delivering more than 50Mb per second, the system can flag them for a proactive device upgrade offer. If poor WiFi coverage is detected in specific areas of a home, A1 Macedonia can recommend its mesh networking solutions. The network data, in other words, becomes a sales tool as well as an operational one – and ensures a target approach, rather than a general one which may disengage the customer.
Billing: A1’s growth engine
Running in parallel with the cloud and service assurance programmes is a major transformation of A1 Macedonia’s billing infrastructure, delivered in partnership with global technology company Amdocs – which provides software and services to communications and media companies. The project covers both the operator’s prepaid online charging system and its postpaid billing platform.
The modernisation goes beyond a straightforward upgrade. Amdocs’ platform introduces components including an AI-powered product catalogue, a high-performance rating engine and updated customer management modules. Together, these enable more flexible pricing models, faster creation of new offers and tighter integration between billing, customer systems and digital channels.
The strategic ambition is to reposition billing from a back-office function into a commercial engine – one capable of supporting the rapid monetisation of new services as A1 Macedonia’s digital portfolio continues to expand. Aleksandar acknowledges that the project is resource-intensive but with the effort justified by the journey and ultimate results.
AI as an engine of transformation
Across all three pillars of transformation, AI is present – and that presence will only continue to grow, Aleksandar says.
A1 Macedonia has integrated Microsoft Copilot – Microsoft’s AI-powered productivity assistant – across its workforce as part of this shift. By integrating Copilot across A1’s operations, the aim is not to streamline the amount of A1 personnel but to remove what Aleksandar calls drudge work, freeing technical staff to focus on complex problem-solving rather than routine code and documentation.
Customer-facing AI is a core focus, too. A voice bot, powered by natural language processing (NLP), handles routine customer enquiries around the clock. On top of these, internal chatbots serve as knowledge hubs for employees, helping them navigate complex processes and retrieve technical information quickly.
But Aleksandar’s attention is fixed on what he believes is the next significant frontier. “I’m certain — not just assuming — that predictive network maintenance, autonomous network management and digital twins will be the next big thing in telco,” he says. The volume of data generated by routers, core network systems and radio access infrastructure creates an opportunity for AI to move from the customer service layer into the heart of network operations itself.
Proofs of concept are already emerging in operational support systems (OSS) and network IT applications. The trajectory, Aleksandar believes, is clear – voice bots and chatbots are the visible face of AI in telco today. From his perspective, it’s autonomous networks — systems capable of detecting, diagnosing and resolving network issues without human intervention — that will come next.
The future of A1 Macedonia
With cloud migration past the halfway mark, service assurance live in the field and billing modernisation under way, A1 Macedonia’s transformation programme is entering its next phase. Aleksandar says that cybersecurity will intensify as a priority as more devices connect to the network and edge computing will extend the cloud programme into new territory.
Throughout, he emphasises that the partner ecosystem will remain central. Relationships with Devoteam and Bulb Technologies are not vendors in the conventional sense — to Aleksander and A1 Macedonia, they are strategic extensions of his own team, chosen because they share the operators’ commitment to agility and user experience.
The destination Aleksandar is building towards is a telco that its customers experience as a seamless digital services partner rather than infrastructure provider. One that fixes problems before they are noticed, adapts its offer to individual behaviour and places the complexity of the technology entirely out of sight.
“We are moving away from the era of waiting for a customer to call and complain,” he says. “We use data to identify and resolve issues before they ever impact the user.”
