Spanish multi-national telco Telefonica has strengthened a partnership with VMware around its Virtual Data Centre (VDC) solution, VDC 3.0. The partnership will see Telefonica offer infrastructure as a service cloud solutions across eight countries, using the software maker’s vSphere, vCentre and vCloud Director.
The solutions will be offered in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, with the addition of USA to its global coverage.
VDC is an IaaS cloud solution, targeted at the transformation process of large enterprises, is implemented on completely private communications that provide ‘a comprehensive solution for the deployment of infrastructures on a flexible and resilient platform with full security guarantees.’
The solution is particularly appealing for multinational customers, these customers require infrastructure services and customers who need to hybridise their private clouds, the company said.
The new VDC 3.0 version includes infrastructure auto-scaling, which responds to peaks in demand or unexpected situations. The infrastructure adapts to the business in a flexible manner, growing or shrinking required.
Marketplace, that includes applications and middleware such as databases, application servers or web servers to enable users to buy them in service mode. Also, dedicated physical environment, which is a new type of VDC that allows users to create a dedicated physical environment with the same characteristics as a Virtual Data Centre.
Telefonica has strengthened its partnership with VMware to accelerate the growth of Cloud services, within its digital transformation.
The two organisations are working to develop a centralised management model that will enable VDC customers to manage the cloud infrastructure deployed in their various local nodes, as well as their international cloud connectivity services through a single portal. Overall, the VDC allows users to create IT environments that combine computing resources (virtual machines), storage, networks (internal, connectivity with Internet and MPLS enterprise virtual private networks) and value-added services (Backup, Monitoring and Disaster Recovery).
Big telcos are targeting the cloud services market as never before as they seek value add and differentiation.
Speaking with CBR in July, John Donovan, AT&T chief strategy officer, said: “Our role has changed – if three or four years ago you’d ask a customer what we were, they’d say ‘you are our carrier.’ And if you asked a multinational, they’d say, what AT&T do a good job at is making it all look the same to me. I buy a circuit in EMEA, in APAC, in the US and it all looks the same to me. And the service looks and feels the same, and it has redundancy and failover etc. You ask them today and they’d say we’re their integrator. Our large multi-national customers have said, ‘your role has changed. We don’t want you to be the carrier, we want you to be the integrator.”
This aligns with the changing risk appetite for new technologies. Companies want to go to Azure to AWS or hybrid cloud.
Mr Donovan says AT&T has moved up the stack. “Many of our multinationals are saying I’ m going to be moving a lot of our workloads to the cloud and I want you to make sure the packets are passing. And it really is requiring us to operate at a higher level of the network.”
Read the interview: AT&T: we intend to be the most aggressive IT company in the world.
CBR also spoke with BT’s CEO of cloud services, Luis Alvarez. He said : “For BT Global Services it is modernisation of infrastructure in terms of networks and transformational outcomes that drive new business opportunities and models.
“Our perspective is that in an environment where there is more and more connectivity the network is absolutely critical. So I think there is a big play for the network. At the core of this digital transformation having the network right is core so the information can flow and so the applications can operate properly. At the core of our Cloud of Clouds strategy is the network.”
Read the interview: BT Cloud CEO: Putting the network at the heart of everything.
Telefonica’s goal is to facilitate the digital transformation of companies by providing them with all the necessary elements to implement this change and helping them at every stage. The Cloud technology is seen as the key pillar of the process, it said.
The Telco has launched the Living Cloud proposal, an initiative that implements the cloud strategy for large enterprises in Spain.
