A1 MACEDONIA
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 30 million customers across seven markets. Locally, the operator serves 1.2 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
“ We are moving away from the era of waiting for a customer to call and complain”
Aleksandar Gichevski Head of IT Services & Architecture A1 Macedonia
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 cloudnative environments while maintaining 99.99 % uptime is like trying to upgrade an aeroplane 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.” a1. mk 7