Saudi Telecom Company Partners with Mirantis for First OpenStack-Powered Public Cloud Services in Middle East and Africa (MEA)

Largest telco in MEA, with more than 100 million customers, Saudi Telecom chooses Mirantis for OpenStack expertise at scale

SUNNYVALE, CA — (Marketwired – Feb. 22, 2016) — Mirantis®, the pure-play OpenStack® company, and Saudi Telecom Company (STC), announced today a partnership to deliver public cloud services on Mirantis OpenStack. The largest telecommunication services provider in the Middle East and North Africa with a presence in nine countries, STC serves more than 100 million customers with a fiber-optic cable network spanning 137,000 kilometers.

Known as an innovator in the region, STC continues to invest heavily in next-generation networking services, such as OpenStack and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to increase business agility, lower costs and improve overall customer experience.

The Mirantis OpenStack partnership will initially deliver public cloud services to STC customers across the Kingdom and the region. It is the first OpenStack public cloud solution offered in MEA and STC is collaborating with Mirantis engineering to explore delivering future private cloud services and a carrier-grade NFV cloud service.

“As the leading telecoms provider in our region, we are innovating the delivery of new cost-effective services to meet the fast-growing demands of our customers,” said Dr. Tarig Enaya, SVP of Enterprise Business Unit in STC. “Mirantis is an ideal partner to provide the base for STC’s OpenStack which is now powering our private, public and carrier-grade cloud initiatives to make STC Group the broadband provider of choice offering ubiquitous access, converged offerings and innovative content and application solutions.”

According to Cisco, MEA will generate the highest cloud data traffic growth in the world, with cloud data forecast to increase to 260 Exabytes (260 billion Gigabytes) by 2018.

“Mirantis has invested heavily in next-generation services delivery on OpenStack and we’re pleased to partner with an innovation leader like Saudi Telecom,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of Mirantis. “More and more of the world’s fast-growing telecommunications providers are turning to OpenStack as the preferred platform for their new cloud services.”