Cloud & Virtualisation

Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA), the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC), and Google Cloud announced yesterday bolstering their strategic partnership to include establishing a new Center of Excellence training facility and new Google office in the State of Qatar.

The African Telecommunications Union (ATU) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Huawei that will see African countries and organizations build capacity for ICT transformation.

Alibaba is clearly keeping busy in the Southeast Asian market. Recent reports indicate major new or ongoing initiatives in the Philippines and Malaysia, along with general investment in the region.

Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the largest mobile network operator in Russia, has signed a cooperation agreement with Microsoft and SAP.

Brazilian mobile market leader Telefonica Brasil (Vivo) performed tests with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the native operation of the core of a 5G standalone (5G SA) network in the cloud, and the results were validated for the performance parameters of a 5G SA network.

Poland-based provider of international geographic telephone numbers (Direct Inward Dialing or DID and International Toll-Free Services or ITFS) DidXL has announced the availability of a new local termination outbound calling service in 22 countries.

Unitary enterprise A1, the largest private telecom, and content service provider in Belarus, and infrastructure operator beCloud have completed work on expanding the 4G network in the Minsk region.

ZTE and the Ningxia Branch of China Telecom have completed the network construction for the cloud-network synergy project, implementing device provisioning in a private industrial network and service deployment in some local networks in Ningxia, China.

The increased adoption of cloud services and Microsoft’s ecosystem is expected to create more than 15,800 jobs across the sultanate of Oman by 2024, says new research by market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

Spending on global cloud infrastructure services increased 35% in the first quarter of 2021 to a record of US $41.8 billion as businesses leaned heavily on the internet in the wake of the pandemic, said a study.

Turkish operator Turkcell is seeking to transform its mobile and fixed network in the country by moving it to a cloud-based network function virtualization (NFV) platform.

Nearly half a million students at Indonesian universities are to get access to what is described as a personal cloud solution over the next three years.

Filipino operator Globe Telecom has gone live with Amdocs’ service and network automation platform for network functions virtualisation (NFV) and cloud orchestration.

China Mobile Cloud has selected Nokia to provide its Nuage Networks end-to-end SDN solution for nationwide deployment of a public cloud service.

Millicom has announced that its Tigo Business division has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand and integrate its managed and professional services into its cloud solutions portfolio in a number of Latin American countries.

Claranet, a technology multinational focused on managed cloud services, has announced an investment of $100 million in its Brazil operation.

Hard on the heels of last week’s report that it boasts the highest average download speed for the mobile internet for 5G service, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has now announced that it has selected Ericsson as its managed services provider in Saudi Arabia.

Ooredoo Algeria has deployed Nokia’s cloud-native core software to cost effectively strengthen its network performance and reliability.

Tele2 has selected Nokia to deploy its Standalone (SA) 5G Core and Voice over 5G (Vo5G) to enhance its cloud infrastructure and improve data and voice connectivity for subscribers in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Claro Brasil has selected Ribbon’s SBC Software Edition to expand and secure their extensive Voice over IP network.

SAP, a leading cloud company with 200 million users worldwide, has announced a major investment in the Indian market.

Last week saw the opening of the Chile Cloud Region, computer technology corporation Oracle’s 29th cloud region worldwide. Latin American customers and partners will now have regional access to many of Oracle’s cloud services.

Argentina’s Metrotel is deploying Nokia’s Altiplano cloud platform for fibre access throughout its network.

Omani company data2cloud has announced that it has achieved official accreditation to provide cloud services to the Omani government.

Russian operator MTS chose Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack cloud computing platform to power the operator’s next-generation cloud infrastructure, to support future service launches such as 5G.

Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecommunications company, has announced its entry into the cloud communications market with the launch of its new offering, Airtel IQ.

Brazil’s Vivo has selected Ribbon’s Session Border Controller to offer enhanced VoIP access and peering services.

NTT has completed an end-to-end network consolidation project for Indonesian operator PT Smartfren Telecom.

Viettel Business Solutions will provide NOW Corp with ICT products and services in the Philippines as the latter’s mobile subsidiary NOW Telecom looks to establish itself as the market’s fourth major operator.

Huawei has announced a new next-gen data storage solution, OneStorage, to provide on-demand storage resources and automatic data O&M management, enabling both operators and enterprises to move towards all-scenario intelligence and multi-cloud convergence.

Airtel bought a 10 per cent stake in AI cloud telephony start-up Wayebo, as part of plans to upgrade its enterprise cloud offering.