NEC Europe today announced that NEC Corporation has made a partnership agreement with PLDT (Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company), the Philippines’ largest telecom company, to enhance PLDT’s portfolio of cloud services with the launch of its own cloud infrastructure.
After offering a set of different cloud services since 2010, PLDT is now ready to offer solutions from its public cloud starting with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), a virtualised computing solution that gives businesses the benefit of a full and highly scalable IT resource, which they can directly provision, modify and monitor.
The solution proposed by NEC will enable PLDT’s customers to reduce their expenses on IT infrastructure through the utilisation of flexible virtual computing resources, like virtual data centres and virtual machines, and simply access and manage them from any web browser.
PLDT’s customers will be able to reduce the response time for provisioning new infrastructure thanks to the self-service portal included in NEC’s proposition. This portal will allow enterprises to deploy virtual machines based on templates provided by NEC, simplifying the process of provisioning and allowing a rapid IT infrastructure deployment process.
PLDT’s IaaS platform is divided across several data centres, allowing its business customers to select their preferred site to deploy IT infrastructure and distribute the infrastructure between datacenters to ensure business continuity. NEC solutions simplify the management of distributed platforms, providing a single global view of all the resources available on each site, and applying consistent business policies across all of them (users, billing, etc…).
NEC’s solution also has multi-hypervisor capability, which will later provide PLDT the possibility of adding new hypervisors to the platform and provide different tiers of service to their customers, covering the needs of different companies in the market.
PLDT’s IaaS service is provisioned from the NEC Cloud Brokerage Suite (marketplace), where many other cloud services can be marketed by the carrier, based on the concept of a “single basket” and reducing the time-to-market of new cloud services. This marketplace can be found at: www.pldtcloud.com.
NEC Philippines will provide and maintain the cloud computing infrastructure for PLDT’s IaaS offering. NEC, together with its partner Abiquo, was selected after a rigorous evaluation process given its capabilities in IT and networking solutions, as well as its expertise in managing cloud solutions and supporting other telecom operators around the world.
“PLDT Cloud is housed in our extensive network of PLDT VITRO Data Centers around the country which has enterprise grade reliability and scalability. Enterprise businesses using PLDT Cloud can scale to any desired level that the businesses would require. Once a customer is enrolled to PLDT Cloud, virtual machine creation can be done in a matter of minutes,” said PLDT EVP and Head of Enterprise and International & Carrier Business, Eric R. Alberto.
Ken Sugata, General Manager, NEC Global Carrier Cloud Division said: “Together with Abiquo we have provided PLDT with a winning proposition. Our cloud solution makes it easy for service providers such as PLDT to deliver self-service cloud services to their enterprise customers. This in turn enables PLDT to differentiate itself in the telecoms market by offering a wider variety of services to the end user.”
Jim Darragh, CEO, Abiquo commented: “We’re noticing a trend amongst telecom companies looking to move to the cloud to stay ahead of the game by effectively managing customer data that is scattered across various countries. PLDT is a great example; by collaborating with NEC we have delivered a solution that allows them to grow their business quickly and enabled efficiency through a very simple service infrastructure.”