MTN Business and Microsoft have entered into a partnership to provide pan-African cloud computing services from the telecommunications operator’s data centres, the companies said on Thursday.
The platform is powered by Microsoft’s technology and is built on MTN’s multi-protocol label switching network, which has 23 points of presence around the world.
MTN customers will be provided with a self-service management portal, powered by Microsoft Azure Pack.
The move is part of MTN’s plan to become a “formidable and key player” in the IT services market, said MTN South Africa chief enterprise officer Alpheus Mangale, who recently joined MTN from Cisco.
He said the offering will provide corporate clients and the public sector a platform on which to build and run mission-critical applications. In addition, customers can use the platform as a disaster recovery site.
MTN will offer Azure ExpressRoute by the end of September, allowing it to offer what it said will be a more reliable, secure and faster connection to the Azure data centres through a private connection as opposed to going over the public Internet.
News of the deal with Microsoft follows the launch of MTN’s pan-African “Internet of things” platform, which it said “lays the foundations for the introduction of a global machine-to-machine (M2M) Sim card that is expected to give customers the same rate for M2M activity across MTN’s footprint in Africa”. — © 2015 NewsCentral Media
