Huawei and Telefonica agree to promote enterprise migration to cloud

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Huawei has struck a deal with Spanish telco Telefonica that will see the two firms work on helping enterprises move infrastructure onto Telefonica's OpenStack-based cloud.

The agreement will enable firms to use computing, storage and backup services in Telefonica's datacentres with no infrastructure investment required and on a pay-per-use basis.

Huawei will deploy the Telefonica's Open Cloud service based on OpenStack in eight Telefonica datacentres. Telefonica will use Huawei's knowledge and experience of its public cloud service in the Chinese market. The first countries where the service will be deployed are Brazil, Mexico and Chile during the first quarter of 2016 and in five additional locations next year.

The resultant offering is said to offer "competitive pricing" but neither firms have made public how much the cloud service will cost. The services offered include virtual servers, storage and physical servers, also known as bare metal.

"With this agreement Telefonica will be better positioned to serve the needs of thousands of enterprises that require an easily scalable platform in the cloud at a competitive cost and with full reliability and security," said Juan Carlos Lopez-Vives, CEO of Telefonica Business Solutions.

"This is all possible thanks to Telefonica's capabilities providing end-to-end service management including the network and data centre. The smart combination and scale of Telefonica's and Huawei's capabilities reinforce both companies and furthermore represents the best guarantee for our customers."

Ryan Ding, Huawei's executive director of the Board and president of products and solutions said the collaboration agreement "represents a unique milestone in our long successful partnership with Telefonica."

"[It] will certainly have a big impact in promoting the migration of enterprises to the cloud and the digital world in all Telefonica footprint. Joint innovation capabilities, customer focus, global scale will allow us to sustainably bring cutting-edge solutions and differentiated offers to our enterprise clients," he added.

Telefonica and Huawei will also create a cloud innovation centre that will allow the telco to further contribute to the OpenStack community and help reinforce Telefonica's support to innovation models and open standards.

Rene Millman

Rene Millman is a freelance writer and broadcaster who covers cybersecurity, AI, IoT, and the cloud. He also works as a contributing analyst at GigaOm and has previously worked as an analyst for Gartner covering the infrastructure market. He has made numerous television appearances to give his views and expertise on technology trends and companies that affect and shape our lives. You can follow Rene Millman on Twitter.