MWC 2016: Mirantis Rolls Out Public Cloud For Largest Middle Eastern Telco

OpenStacker Mirantis will provide a public cloud service, based on OpenStack, to the largest telco in the Middle East and Africa.

Saudi Telecom has more than 100 million customers in the region, and has chosen Mirantis as its public cloud vendor to dish out cloud services to the nine countries it operates in.

Mirantis also notes that this is the first public cloud platform based on OpenStack to roll out in the region.

Mirantis in the Middle East

“As the leading telecoms provider in our region, we are innovating the delivery of new cost effective services to meet the fast-growing demands of our customers,” said Dr. Tarig Enaya, SVP of Enterprise Business Unit in STC.

“Mirantis is an ideal partner to provide the base for STC’s OpenStack which is now powering our private, public and carrier-grade cloud initiatives to make STC Group the broadband provider of choice offering ubiquitous access, converged offerings and innovative content and application solutions.”

Mirantis pointed to Cisco research that claims the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region will generate the highest cloud data traffic growth in the world, with cloud data forecast to increase to 260 Exabytes (260 billion Gigabytes) by 2018.

That growth is a vital resource to tap in to, and this OpenStack win for Mirantis could prove the potential of OpenStack cloud platforms for telcos versus a more traditional public cloud offering.

“NFV and OpenStack together will allow telcos to roll out services more quickly and cost efficiently,” Rajiv Sodhi, Director EMEA, Telco & Service Providers at Mirantis told TechWeekEurope. “STC is the latest telco to recognise the value and strength of the combination and has partnered with Mirantis to implement Mirantis OpenStack to power its public, private and carrier-grade cloud services. Mirantis already has a strong presence in the telco space and we expect to gain greater traction in this market.”

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