Portugal Telecom has heralded the launch of its new data centre that has enabled the company to fully transform to offer a wider range of services than ever.
Established initially as a fixed line provider to the Portuguese market, PT has now successfully incorporated broadband connectivity, voice calls and pay-TV to become an internationally focused global player.
Already a prominent provider of triple play services in Portugal and Brazil, with landline and mobile presence elsewhere is South America, Africa and Asia, PT is looking to increase the amount of content it is able to offer.
PT’s new data centre in Covilhã, Portugal will enable the company to bolster its video on demand offering, granting additional capacity to store its growing content library to its pay-TV customer base. It will also increase the company’s ability to offer cloud storage to customers all over the world.
Portugal Telecom commands 47% of the triple play market and 40.4% of the pay-TV market. The company is introducing additional interactive features and now delivers catch up facilities for over a hundred channels for the last seven days, along with 5,000 movies on demand.
Zeinal Bava, CEO of Portugal Telecom, said, "The transformation of our business was a natural progression that takes into account the changing ways in which consumers communicate and their expectation of instant access to connectivity and content.
"Over half of our revenue now comes from non-voice and B2C customers are spending an increased amount of time connected through a more diverse range of devices. Our new data centre gives us a place to centrally store our growing catalogue of content, but more importantly, it makes a huge statement of our ambition to reflect the increasingly data hungry public both in domestic and international marketplaces."
PT has also launched the first truly converged quadrupleplay offer M4O, which includes TV, broadband, landline, mobile and next generation on-demand services. It is gaining momentum, having reached one million revenue generating units.
Zeinal concluded, "The cloud features very strongly in the future of our offering for both residential and business customers. Our MEO Cloud service offers 16GB of storage to customers all over the world, while our enterprise solutions include a suite of solutions that include Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. Convergence is a difference maker in the marketplace we operate in and shifting the parameters to bring that convergence into homes and businesses more easily has helped us to solidify our market position."
Portugal Telecom also recently announced that it is to merge with its Brazilian affiliate Oi, to create a new company. It’s a company with roots in the Portuguese-speaking world and a potential market of 260 million people. It’s also a company that is among the top in the world, with more than 100 million clients, 70 thousand employees and presence in 4 continents. Although the company will have a unified management team, Portugal Telecom and Oi will retain their names in their respective countries. Zeinal Bava, CEO of Portugal Telecom from 2008 to 2013 and the current CEO of Oi and PT Portugal, will be the CEO of CorpCo and its subsidiaries.
