Citing its previous infrastructure as being expensive to run and time consuming to maintain Orange Digital, which manages the online portals for EE, has moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The firm claims that by moving to Amazon’s cloud, it is better able to support spikes in traffic and capacity and reduce costs by £2m over a three-year period.

The African enterprise space may be in the nascent stages of development, but it’s time has certainly come. A new stream, Enterprise ICT Africa, made its appearance at AfricaCom this year, putting a strong focus on the opportunities for cloud services in the region.

As many of the industry’s thought leaders have advised, Africa is in a good position to generate opportunities where other more developed regions have failed. On the opening day Camille Mendler, principal analyst and head of enterprise verticals at Informa Telecoms & Media, called for new segmentation methods for the market in order to capitalise on contextual opportunities. In this case, Mendler believes there is a significant opportunity for cloud services in the ‘long tail’, the blue collar market and micro-businesses.

An organisation founded in 2010 to define the future of Linux on low power mobile chips from ARM has won support from social networking giant Facebook.

Telefónica Digital is bolstering its global public cloud service with a toolkit that offers users greater control and provisioning of virtual servers.

Dubbed ‘Instant Servers’, which sounds like something created by adding a spoonful of granules to a mug of hot water, the service is based on technology from Joyent, which allows customers to configure the size of their virtual server in terms of RAM memory, CPU and hard drive as well as choose the Operating System (SmartOS, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows Server, Fedora and Debian) the virtual server runs on.

A subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom is building a datacentre the size of 30 football fields in order to help satisfy Germany’s high demand for cloud services.

T-Systems, the IT and telecommunication services arm of the operator group, will begin operations from the 150,000m2 datacentre, which will be Germany’s largest, in 2014.

There is a clear need for standardisation of network virtualisation and cloud services – that was the verdict of Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, chief technology officer at Deutsche Telekom, who delivered a keynote presentation at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam this morning.

Marxist theory made an appearance at the beginning of his presentation – Jacobfeuerborn averred that it is now easier to start up an enterprise as capital is more widely distributed than at the time of Marx in 19th century Germany.

In parallel with the adoption of LTE in the wireless space, the fixed line community is undergoing its own long term evolution. Speaking to a small group of journalists and analysts outside the RAI yesterday morning, Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO of equipment vendor Ericsson, said the explosive growth in cloud technology was spurring the requirement for Software Defined Network (SDN) specifications for service providers and telcos.

“The architecture of the network must evolve to cater to growth,” Uwaldsson said, referring to forecasts that data traffic will increase 15 fold over the next five years, having already grown 104 per cent year on year between 2011 and 2012.

Mobile banking will be an increasingly important channel for UK banks and financial institutions over the next three years and will be a key factor in retaining customers and increasing loyalty.

In a survey of 50 CIOs from across the UK wholesale, investment and retail banking sector, 49 per cent of organisations said that mobile banking is important to customers today, while 71 per cent predict it will be by 2015.

In 1919 Irish poet WB Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’, a work that conjured the image of a “spiritus mudi”—a vast warehouse that contained all the archetypes of human concepts. This enormous storage facility was located somewhere out in the inhospitable desert, yet magically accessible to every person walking the earth. Almost a century later, in the age of high speed data transport, intelligent networks and virtualisation, it’s easy to forget that behind the almost magical connection delivering information to the screen in front of the end user’s eyes, there is a solid, squat building full of humming electrical equipment. The datacentre is almost an abstract concept in itself. It sits at the heart of the network and carries out many of the critical tasks that keep the services fl owing; rarely, if ever, occupying the attention of the millions of customers it serves.

The vision of a datacentre as a hulking steel warehouse packed with racks and racks of servers studded with flashing lights isn’t far wrong. But what actually goes on behind the glowing LEDs? A telecom operator’s datacentre houses critical applications such as OSS and BSS and everything essential for running the Master Control Centre. As a result, a datacentre requires 24/7 uninterrupted availability, high security, high speed connectivity and lots and lots of power. That power is by far the biggest factor in running a datacentre, so if a carrier can reduce the electricity bill by 30 per cent, they can dramatically reduce cost. This consideration has influenced a number of approaches to datacentre building. Scale—a common concern in the telecoms industry—is another important dynamic affecting which approach an operator takes.

The advantages of faster connectivity are rarely questioned these days, with consumers told it will improve their access to lifestyle and content services and enterprise users focused on improved productivity. Often the touted benefits are, to a degree, abstract. But in the world of high-frequency financial trading (HFT), the benefits are very measurable and very significant.