Category Archives: Telefonica

Huawei, migration, Telco Cloud, Telefonica

Telefónica and Huawei team up over cloud migration

Reflections are seen on a logo of Spain's telecommunications giant Telefonica in MadridEquipment maker Huawei and B2B service provider Telefónica Business Solutions are to jointly offer a global service migrating clients’ internal IT systems to the cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

Under the terms of their agreement they will help enterprises to outsource the running of their own computing, storage and backup services to Telefónica’s data centres without making any infrastructure investment. The cloud services offered will be charged on a pay per use basis. According to a Huawei statement, the virtual servers will be run as ‘bare metal’ (i.e. without hypervisors.) Telefónica and Huawei will jointly run a Cloud innovation centre with the aim to contribute to the OpenStack community and help to create new cloud services.

The logistics of the arrangement involve Huawei using Telefónica’s Open Cloud service based on OpenStack in eight Telefónica data centres. Telefónica will use Huawei’s knowledge and experience on its public cloud service in the Chinese market. The first countries targeted for the service are Brazil, Mexico and Chile, where it will be launched in the first quarter of 2016. Five additional locations are planned for the same year.

Telefónica will be in a better position to serve its enterprise customers with an easily scalable system at a competitive cost, according to Juan Carlos Lopez-Vives, CEO Telefónica Business Solutions. “The combination of Telefónica’s and Huawei’s capabilities represents the best guarantee for our customers,” said Lopez-Vives.

China Unicom, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, Telefonica

China Unicom and Telefónica in global data centre sharing agreement

Reflections are seen on a logo of Spain's telecommunications giant Telefonica in MadridTelefónica and China Unicom have agreed to share their international data centre capacity for multinational clients across Europe, The Americas and Asia.

The initial agreement covers three major data centres from each operator but, the companies say, this could be the first step towards larger scale cloud cooperation.

The pooling of resources means China Unicom can support customers seeking to expand into Europe and The Americas while Telefónica can strengthen its proposition across Asia.The cloud computing aspect of the agreement includes IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with virtual servers and multi-cloud solutions.

China Unicom’s customers can now benefit from Telefónica’s data centre presence in Sao Paolo in Brazil, Miami in the US and Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. The extent of the partnership will expand as Telefónica commits additional investment towards new infrastructure, facilities and multi-cloud solutions, it says. Conversely, Telefónica can use the cloud capacity of China Unicom’s data centres located across China in Langfang, Shanghai and Chongqing. This, it says, means it can offer end-to-end service delivery for its multinational customers.

China Unicom’s data centre provides international connectivity services including virtual private networks, multi protocol label switching (MPLS) and Global LAN. Internet access for customers’ servers can be offered as an option to the standard service. Every China Unicom Point of Presence comes with ‘meet me’ room services. The mutual colocation service also offers local support for customer equipment.

Telefónica has a presence in 21 countries and a customer base of 329 million accesses around the world, with its major markets being in Spain, Europe and Latin America. Telecom operator China Unicom offers mobile broadband (WCDMA, LTE FDD, TD-LTE), fixed-line broadband, GSM, fixed-line local access, ICT, data communications and related services. It has a total of 439 million subscribers.

Juan Manuel Moreno, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Telco Cloud, Telco Cloud Forum, Telefonica, Unica

Telefónica: Unifying cloud and comms can make us more efficient

Juan Manuel Moreno, global cloud director at Telefónica

Juan Manuel Moreno, global cloud director at Telefónica

Telefónica is working to roll out a wide range of internally and customer-focused cloud services on both its own UNICA and OpenStack platforms, but the company’s global cloud director Juan Manuel Moreno said the challenges of shifting such a large company aren’t purely technical.

Moreno, who was speaking at the Telco Cloud Forum in London Tuesday, said the company has been in the process of transforming its technology platforms and internal operations for some time.

It’s no secret telcos like Telefónica have in recent years worked to strengthen their cloud capabilities in a bid to broaden their service portfolios and battle dwindling voice and data revenues – and to regain ground lost to more nimble OTT players.

“We are reliant on the full ecosystem of providers of technology… using technology partners to build these new services. But it’s a challenge because these players are moving so quickly,” Moreno said. “One of the biggest challenges in this space is that everyone and everything is moving so quickly.”

Much of what the company has done externally was intricately linked with its efforts to virtualize core elements of its own networks, plans it originally set out in 2014, with the aim of virtualising 30 per cent of all new infrastructure by 2016. The company took many of those platforms to use as the foundation for their customer-facing cloud services.

“Unifying communications and cloud or IT is an opportunity to be more efficient, to discover more services, and of course to develop a broad portfolio of services,” he explained.

But he was fairly candid about the challenges involved with moving Telefónica, a large, global service provider with very heterogeneous technology platforms and business processes, over to a more automated, cloud-centric operational model and product portfolio.

He said overcoming the business process-related challenges would also be key if the company is to effectively capture more revenue from its traditional base as well as new segments (he said Telefónica sees SMBs as the largest commercial opportunity for the foreseeable future).

“In cloud the technology is available for everyone now… But we still have to transform internally in order to really strengthen our market position,” he added.