Ep 144 - TDC’s dragon in the basement (Carlos Moreno Alonso)

Every 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.

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This week’s guest:

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.

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