Safaricom says its future maintenance and upgrades on its mobile money platform M-Pesa will drastically be reduced to remain successful by driving efficiency, ensuring reliability and improving sustainability. 

This year, Safaricom has undertaken over 10 enhancements and maintenance of its systems consequently, complaints from its customers have not stopped.

George Njuguna, chief information officer at Safaricom says on the M-Pesa platform, they are working on canary deployment to reduce the risk of deploying a new version that impacts the workload. 

Canary deployment is the slow rollout of a new version of an existing application.

“You actually can deploy a release to a subset of customers or a certain region, get it tested and if they like it, you deploy to everyone else. If you don’t like it we roll it back,” he said during his presentation on “DevOps: Moving Fast Without Breaking Things”.

He was speaking at the CIO Africa Awards & Symposium on Friday at Sarova Whitesands Hotel, Mombasa.

He also said they have taken note of the complaints from customers whenever they do large M-Pesa upgrades.

“I am happy to tell this, the last one, was the longest downtime that we will have on M-Pesa. Our adoption of new technologies means M-Pesa upgrades will last only 15 minutes instead of the 4- 10 hours that we have been taking,” he disclosed.

He emphasised that the telco cannot afford t continue having its customers have long downtime because of the changes.

According to the Half Year results, M-Pesa customers have grown 7.1 per cent year-over-year to close at 28.7Million.

How is Safaricom Achieving This?

Njuguna says the telco is moving towards artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). This is a multi-layered technology platform that automates and enhance IT operations through analytics and machine learning (ML).

“How can the system actually be able t tell us where the problem is and actually fix it? adding that is where we are headed in terms of technology.

“We are innovating for the customer…We do not do technology for the sake of it…are we doing actually things that actually impact the customer and hearing from them,” said Njuguna.

The telco’s digital engineering is driven by customer obsession that gives focus to responsiveness, stability and trust. This encompasses embracing modern Software Engineering Practices and supporting innovation.