Vodafone plans ‘brand new e-commerce platform’

Vodafone Australia has slipped out news that it will build “a brand new e-commerce platform to assist … customers on the selection and purchase of mobile phone plans.”

Those words come from a job ad that seeks “a number of Senior Full Stack Java Technical Leaders” to build the platform.  Applicants will need “Java with experience in other back end technologies such as NodeJS and Ruby” plus skills on ReactJS and the AWS ecosystem.

Despite advertising the platform, Vodafone Australia answered a request for more detail from iTnews with a simple  “we don’t disclose details around our back end systems.”

Which is a bit odd given that in 2015 iTnews heard the company explain how it uses SAS software to calculate customer sentiment daily and at another talk in 2018 detailed how it uses Splunk and New Relic. Splunk announced that deal with a press release and the telco has also signed off an AWS case study, a Salesforce case study relating to work that’s the subject of a Bluewolf case study and also spruiked many projects in its Tasmanian call centre.

But we digress.

The skillset required for the new jobs mentioned above matches those possessed by LinkedIn profiles of Vodafone Australia workers who mention working on the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform at the telco.

iTnews has therefore inquired if Oracle ATG will remain in place after this new project is complete, as it looks most at risk than SAS, Splunk or Saleforce once the a "brand new platform" lands. 

If Vodafone offers a meaningful reply, we’ll let you know.

UPDATE: 11:00AM, February 18th

Vodafone has been in touch and now says "This advertisement was for a backfill position. The position was filled some time ago (ie. the ad is historical)." iTnews found the 

The company also said the ad's mention of "a number of Senior Full Stack Java Technical Leaders" - note the plural - was used because "The requirements for the position were misinterpreted by a third party supplier" and that it only had one job on offer.

None of which changes the fact that Vodafone has a big new e-commerce project on the cook, hasn't denied the detail in the ad and that the project seemingly has the potential to displace or reduce the importance of incumbent suppliers.