There’s no doubt that the telecommunications industry is an ever-evolving landscape, seeing an unprecedented rate of change thanks to technological advancements and the growing demand for digital services at the snap of one’s fingers.

Few understand the industry’s technological intricacies better than Julian Davidge, Director of Technology, Service and Operations at Virgin Media O2 (VMO2). In his role, Julian has a front-row seat to the rapid advancements and challenges that shape the sector. 

His journey in telecoms began at the tender age of 16 in the British Army's Royal Signals, and his rise to the top of one of the UK’s largest and most iconic communications brands has been marked by resilience, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of excellence.

Virgin Media O2’s technological journey

“One thing that can be said about VMO2 and telecoms in general is that no two days are the same and technology is moving faster and faster as the desire to do something different increases,” Julian begins. “The need to change is massive. Working on a variety of products and services from a very technical level all the way through to talking to customers, the variety — the breadth and the depth — makes my job quite exciting.”

VMO2 has been on — and continues to navigate — a transformation journey. The company was formed in 2021 with the merging of Virgin Media and O2, two of the UK’s leaders in telecommunications.

This has massively expanded the reach and quality of the company’s offering, with every other household in the UK a customer of the company, with its consumer mobile and broadband offerings and its products and services supporting thousands of businesses behind the scenes. 

“It’s amazing that this is the responsibility that we have, it’s extensive,” Julian continues. “We have more than 45 million mobile connections and nearly six million broadband connections. It’s a big responsibility.”

To keep such vital infrastructure running, Julian and his team are at the essence of VMO2’s technology mission, which endeavours to deliver a connected experience that its customers trust, love and advocate for.

This also applies to VMO2’s wider workforce, which it empowers to innovate in delivering connectivity to the benefit of its customers and to ensure it remains fit for the future.

To Julian, who joined the company when it operated solely as O2 in 2018, what Virgin Media O2 looks like now compared to its inception is night and day difference.

“We've taken the best part of both cultures,” Julian says. “There’s been a lot of change and we’ve still got more to do. It’s a big job when you look at it from the perspective of network, business and systems integration, as well as customer integration.

“I’m really proud of what has been achieved in the last three years, it’s been an amazing journey.”

As Julain and his team move forward to ensure VMO2 continues to deliver the best service, he emphasises the importance of consolidating high-quality data into a single, accessible location to enable effective machine decision-making. This comes in the form of AI-driven pattern recognition, which predicts and prevents problems and, as a result, ensures minimal customer impact. 

Utilising this intelligence across the likes of consumer, business and internal operations,  significant advancements have been made as automation and AI has drastically reduced time required for tasks, allowing the team to concentrate on more critical activities instead of routine transactions.

Julian explains: “The primary focus has been around getting all the data sources and good quality data in a single place so it can be accessed on a regular basis. If you can't do that, then you can't ask machines to make decisions on your behalf. 

“We are now in a place now where things that used to take days are now done at the click of a button, within a second,” Julian shares. “It’s freeing up so much time to ensure that we can focus on the right things rather than transactional tasks.

“With the presence of social media, things have moved on so much that we are in a space now where sometimes our customers are telling us there’s a problem before we know about it.

“Predicting and preventing has become even more important than it was before, because the last thing you want to do is get told by your customer that there’s a problem.”

VMO2’s pursuit of fully automated network operations

Following the successes with automation across the business, VMO2 is heavily investing in this application approach — something Julian has billed as one of his top priorities of the next 12 to 18 months.

This involves VMO2 teams developing new skills to ensure they are equipped to handle the technology and ensure it brings about the desired benefits.

Virgin Media O2 is using technology  to ensure many issues are resolved without human intervention.

“Another real key element for us is the amount of automation,” Julian continues. “We can achieve a lot more without having to give it to a field engineer, for example, meaning it won’t take as long to fix.

“There is also a benefit from an environmental and sustainability perspective, because every time a truck goes out — even if it's an EV — there’s still an environmental impact. We are working hard to reduce any tickets going out to field engineers so we can action work remotely.”

Partnerships enrich VMO2’s technological innovation

Trusted partners are key to Julian and add value to the work conducted by him and his teams that benefit both the wider business and its customers as a result. To Julian, organisations such as Accenture are not there to provide an additional service, but are long standing partners that enhance and enrich VMO2’s operation.

“Our partners have to add value, show they care about our customers and bring their own ideas to the table from different market experiences,” Julian shares. “This is where partners like Accenture really bring those qualities to us as partnerships.”

By working with Accenture, VMO2 has access to feedback on the quality of its operations and can leverage its industry expertise. For Julian personally, he feels Accenture helps hold VMO2 accountable and encourages its continued progress.

“As much as we would love to do everything ourselves, we don't have the ability to stop what we're doing to really focus on something because we’re busy all the time,” Julian says. “The speed to get things done from partnerships is the key here as well as clarity on what the outputs will look like. Partners like Accenture will detail what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it and the results we can expect to see.”

An exciting time for telecoms

It’s these partnerships that Julian and VMO2 will hang onto tightly as it forges ahead.

“Telecoms is going to be exciting for the foreseeable future,” Julain says. “With that being said, for the next 18 months we’re going to hone in on our customer focus. This is going to be the differentiator that makes us stand out. 

“You can provide a great network and you can tell people how good it is, but they're the ones that need to advocate it for you. As always, our focus is going to absolutely be on the customer.”

This sits alongside VMO2’s ongoing significant transformation to ensure it is best equipped for the future. Although he admits there is still a long way to go to truly converge and simplify VMO2’s services, Julian is positive that the technology division’s work is being balanced with the continuing development of its service reliability.

Another future focus continues on from VMO2’s work in predicting and preventing culture across its wider ecosystem. This involves taking the culture from both Virgin Media and O2 when they operated as separate entities and uniting the best practices moving forward.

“There’s always more to do,” Julian concludes. “Our focus now is on how we continue our transformation journey. 

“To make sure that our customers really see us as a differentiator, automation, pattern recognition and AI are going to play a massive part in our operations.”

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