Information and communications technology solutions provider Huawei and Telefonica Business Solutions, a provider of range of integrated communication solutions for the B2B market, have reached an agreement to promote the migration of traditional IT services to the cloud.
The agreement is designed to strengthen the capabilities of both companies, helping enterprises migrate their servers to the cloud, allowing these companies to use computing, storage, and backup services in Telefonica’s data centers with no infrastructure investment required and on a pay-per-use basis.
Huawei will deploy Telefonica’s Open Cloud service based on OpenStack in eight Telefonica data centers, while Telefonica will use Huawei’s knowledge and experience on its public cloud service in the Chinese market.
The service will be deployed in Brazil, Mexico and Chile during the first quarter of 2016 and in five additional locations later on next year.
“Huawei is a long-standing partner for telecom equipment with Telefonica. Earlier this month, Telefonica and Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop, evaluate and research requirements for a 5G network architecture,” Francis Hopkins, director of corporate communications at Huawei USA, told eWEEK. “Huawei began researching 5G in 2009 and has committed $600 million in R&D to the technology.”
Huawei already had a strategic partnership with Telefonica Group for enterprise solutions, particularly around big data and cloud platforms. Huawei has similar strategic partnerships with SAP, Accenture, Intel, T-Systems and Vodafone.
Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group was born from it, providing white-label enterprise solutions to global carriers that sold the solutions to large enterprises.
The two companies’ latest cloud innovation efforts are an extension of their ongoing joint innovation projects, focused on new vertical services for the carrier group, such as video, Internet applications and session border controller for VoLTE (voice over LTE), FTTH (fiber to the home), software-defined network commercialization and more.
Huawei and Telefonica have been collaborating in joint innovation centers since 2008.
“As carriers such as Telefonica look to drive more revenues from their infrastructure, offering public cloud services to enterprises has become an obvious area where they can provide more value to customers,” Hopkins said.
Huawei has been a strong industry proponent of OpenStack and will bring its expertise to the Telefonica relationship, he said, pointing out that Huawei’s FusionSphere cloud operating system, which allows enterprises to manage both virtual and physical networks, supports the OpenStack open-source cloud platform.