Cisco announced on Saturday that the Saudi Telecom Company (STC), a leader in providing integrated communications services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has chosen Cisco technology solutions to introduce managed data center services to the Saudi market. The contract, which will be delivered by Cisco partner Wipro, represents the first Vblock Infrastructure Package (VIP) win for Cisco in the Middle East region, involving the strategic collaboration that combines best-of-breed virtualization, networking, compute and storage technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, with end-to-end vendor accountability. Data centers are changing in architecture, new technologies, application architectures, regulations, efficiency focus, and application and workload demands. These changes are causing one of the most comprehensive IT infrastructure transformations in the past decade. Cisco Managed Data Center services will enable the STC to meet the challenge to address these changes. Samir Matboly, vice president, Enterprise Business Unit, STC, said “STC's goal is to provide integrated communications services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, by continuously to responding to market requirements, and keeping abreast of developments in technology to enable us to meet the needs of our customers. The Cisco team has demonstrated the ability to provide the STC Data Center 3.0 vision and technology solutions to equip us with the right technology for managed data center services and cloud computing.” Wayne Fullerton, managing director for Cisco in Saudi Arabia, said “the demand for managed services in the information technology (IT) market globally is growing as companies strive to streamline their IT costs although it is still a new concept into the Saudi Service Provider market. By joining forces with EMC and VMware, Cisco has teamed with the best eco-system partners and technology providers to provide the STC with the competitive edge that will allow them to stay ahead of the game when it comes to delivering their customer needs.” The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, formed jointly by Cisco, EMC and VMware, represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services, and partner enablement that will help to reduce the infrastructure virtualization risks the STC could face in private cloud implementation. Cisco partner Wipro, a leading global provider of integrated business, technology and process solutions, will deliver the Cisco infrastructure to the STC. The Cisco global and regional team, focused on service provider data center cloud, in collaboration with the regional VCE team conducted a series of dedicated data center focused workshop sessions to share best practices in designing and operating data center solutions with the STC. They also provided a Saudi market specific services creation and market demand analysis for revenue calculations. Cisco's data center services will help to lower power costs as well manage and measure the STC's IT operational expenses while increasing support for virtual desktops and mission-critical applications and also meeting or exceeding end
