UAE telco du has expanded its managed services portfolio by launching the Business Cloud platform, which constitutes a range of cloud-based services through Encloud.
du said that the new platform offers? standard cloud building blocks that support a number of market segments – from small to medium businesses to large enterprise customers.
The services are customisable based on individual requirements, du said, and are delivered from a virtual data centre out of a hosting facility in Dubai. du added that each is service can be provisioned "in minutes", are scalable and can be paid for using a pay-as-you-go Opex model.
With Business Cloud, du is offering virtual servers, virtual storage and data back-up with bundled bandwidth. More advanced services such as private clouds, community clouds and virtual desktops are also available, with more to come in the future, du said.
Along with Encloud, du has also partnered with Cisco, EMC and Citrix to offer these services. For example, the telco is using Cloudplatform and CloudPortal from Citrix to manage the services.
Hatem Bamatraf, Executive Vice President for Enterprise, du, said that the telco was seeing an increased demand for managed services in the UAE.
"Managed services provide companies with the opportunity to employ a full suite of IT services to suit their business needs, without having to directly employ professionals within their company," he said.
"The launch of du Business Cloud platform services brings further value to our managed services suite, giving out enterprise customers the freedom to focus on their core business while we take care of the rest."
Fady Younes, Client Director, Cisco UAE, said that cloud computing has "come of age" in the UAE, meaning the vendor sees such partnerships as "significant".
"As cloud traffic continues to proliferate in a new world of many clouds, the forecast confirms that strong growth in data centre usage and cloud traffic are global trends, driven by our growing desire to access personal and business content anywhere, on any device," he said.
With the release of Business Cloud, du is continuing the trend of UAE-based telcos moving away from just offering telecommunications services – du rival Etisalat has invested heavily in B2B cloud services in recent years. It now owns eight data centres and plans to build more in the coming months.
