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Ep 143 – Norlys bets big on Telia (Daniel Askeroth)
Norlys SVP of Telco Daniel Askeroth shares what it takes to integrate companies after a merger—from minimizing customer disruption to workforce challenges.
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Ep 144 – TDC’s dragon in the basement (Carlos Moreno Alonso)
This week’s guest
Carlos Moreno Alonso
Chief Technology & Information Officer TDC BrandsEvery telco has a system it can’t get rid of—a mainframe, a billing platform, a vendor with hooks in everything. The transformation math is brutal: years of work, massive investment, and a failure rate that makes every next attempt harder to sell internally.
Carlos Moreno Alonso is CTIO at TDC Brands, Denmark’s largest telecom provider. Nine months into the job, he’s leading the next phase of one of Europe’s biggest IT transformations—including wrestling with a decades-old mainframe that the former CEO called “a dragon in the basement.” He talks about inheriting a transformation mid-flight and what strategies actually work when your legacy system is too entangled to rip out.
Listen now to hear:
- How TDC got its consumer business onto a modern stack [03:58];
- Carlos’s two-part plan for the harder B2B side [06:45];
- Where AI actually speeds migration [07:56]; and
- The phase of transformation that is the heaviest lift [09:32].
Links and resources
- Read the announcement that Nuuday is now TDC Brands, which unites six brands—YouSee, TDC Erhverv, Telmore, Hiper, eesy, and Relatel—under one 145-year-old name.
- Learn how TDC Brands brought Carlos on board as CTIO to lead the next phase of its digital transformation project.
- Read the story behind “the dragon in the basement,” a phrase coined by former Nuuday CEO Jon James at DTW 2022. It describes the decades-old Columbus mainframe as a beast that needs to be “fed and watered and constantly checked to make sure it’s still breathing.”
- Ready to slay your own dragon? Learn how the Totogi Ontology sits over your mainframe, BSS, and network systems so they speak one language, letting you retire one legacy system at a time.
- Check out the live World Cup standings as the tournament plays out across North America. When we recorded, I was pulling for Mexico, and Carlos was backing Spain. As of this episode’s release, England knocked Mexico out, but Spain squeaked past Portugal to move into the quarterfinals. Looks like Carlos gets the bragging rights—for now.
- Think World Cup stakes are high? Try kids’ soccer. In the 2005 movie Kicking and Screaming, Will Ferrell’s Coach Phil gets so threatened when his assistant (NFL legend Mike Ditka) offers coaching advice that he orders him to fetch a juice box instead. Even the fiercest competitors need to hydrate.
- Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.
- You can find the episode transcript here.
Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value it can bring.
Guest bio
Carlos Moreno Alonso is CTIO of TDC Brands in Denmark, where he oversees a 700-person IT organization (employees and subcontractors) and leads the company’s cloud BSS migration and AI-driven automation programs. Over a 25-year career spanning ONO, Vodafone Spain, Vodafone Italy, and Vodafone Group, Carlos has run complex BSS transformation programs, including a four-year platform overhaul at Vodafone Italy and the post-acquisition integration of ONO into Vodafone Spain. He most recently served as CTIO at Adamo.
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Podcast credits
- Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
- Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
- Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
- Audio Editor: Andrew Condell
- Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery
- Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
- Music: Dyami Wilson
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the “dragon in the basement”?
It’s the nickname former Nuuday CEO Jon James gave to Columbus, the decades-old COBOL mainframe running TDC Brands’ enterprise systems. He coined the phrase at DTW 2022, describing a beast that needs to be constantly fed, watered, and checked just to keep breathing. CTIO Carlos Moreno Alonso is now leading the effort to retire it.
2. How long did it take TDC Brands to modernize its consumer business?
About four and a half years. TDC Brands migrated roughly 75% of consumer customers off its legacy mainframe onto a fully cloud-native BSS/OSS stack, with the project set to complete by the end of 2026. CTIO Carlos Moreno Alonso says the results have been strong, giving the team confidence heading into the tougher enterprise migration. Read the announcement that Nuuday is now TDC Brands.
3. What is Carlos Moreno Alonso’s strategy for migrating the harder B2B side?
Two complementary moves: first, dismantle the systems surrounding the Columbus mainframe—like sales and customer management tools—to capture quick value; and second, “lightweight” Columbus by rehosting and replatforming its COBOL code into Java using AI. TDC Brands brought in a specialist migration partner to help, since the mainframe vendor wasn’t best positioned to lead the work.
4. Where does AI actually help speed legacy migrations?
TDC Brands plans to use AI to transform Columbus’s COBOL code into Java, then to optimize the resulting system. Carlos Moreno Alonso calls it a major learning opportunity for his team, expecting the AI-assisted rehosting effort to take roughly a year to a year and a half once it starts. Danielle Rios (DR) notes that Totogi uses AI and its ontology similarly, to help telcos map and migrate data off legacy systems, including mainframes, into modern platforms.
5. Why does data mapping take the longest in a mainframe migration?
Because decades-old systems like Columbus were never designed with future migration in mind, making it hard to reconstruct how their data is structured and connected. Carlos says this “critical” mapping step consumes more time than rewriting code or building new platforms. It’s exactly the problem the Totogi Ontology was built to solve, acting as a knowledge layer that sits over legacy mainframes, BSS, and network systems.
6. How can telcos get help tackling their own legacy migration challenges?
Danielle Rios (DR) and the Totogi team work directly with telco executives on AI and public cloud transformation strategy, including legacy migrations. Telco execs can set up a meeting with the Totogi team to explore how AI-driven tools, like the Totogi Ontology, can help retire legacy systems one at a time.