Merging two telecom companies is hard enough on its own. Doing it while also untangling their technology stacks from a scattered mess of multi-cloud platforms is the kind of project that usually takes years, not months. XLSMART, the Indonesian operator formed by combining XL Axiata and Smartfren, just pulled off something close to the latter, completing a full public cloud migration with Tencent Cloud in roughly four and a half months.
The scale involved is hard to overstate. The migration moved 1,200 microservices, 1,100 APIs, and 900 business interfaces, along with more than 15 terabytes of core data, all without downtime for a company serving over 69 million customers. Before this project started, the merger had left more than 60 core applications scattered across fragmented cloud platforms, making unified operations nearly impossible.
What made the timeline realistic at all was AI. Tencent Cloud built more than 20 specialized tools, internally called Skills, using its coding assistant CodeBuddy and AI workspace WorkBuddy, automating tasks that traditionally eat up months of manual engineering work. Two of those tools handled what’s usually the slowest part of any migration: scanning existing infrastructure and mapping it to new cloud configurations, then automatically generating architecture diagrams and design specs that engineers would otherwise build by hand in spreadsheets.
XLSMART also chose not to take the easy route. Rather than simply lifting old systems and dropping them onto new cloud infrastructure unchanged, the company rebuilt the majority of its applications, a decision that added real complexity given the involvement of more than ten third-party vendors working across different systems and languages.
Yessie D. Yosetya, XLSMART’s Chief Information and Technology Officer, framed the project as something bigger than a technical migration, describing it as a foundation meant to help the company innovate faster going forward. Poshu Yeung of Tencent Cloud said the team has already folded the migration tools built for this project into a reusable platform for future cloud transformations elsewhere.
For other telecom operators watching from the sidelines, the real takeaway might be less about the specific numbers and more about the timeline itself, since a project of this size typically takes considerably longer than five months to pull off.
