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Mirantis > Case Studies > Largest Middle East and North Africa Telecom Provider Builds Innovative Public OpenStack Cloud to Accommodate Expanding Market Demand

Largest Middle East and North Africa Telecom Provider Builds Innovative Public OpenStack Cloud to Accommodate Expanding Market Demand

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration
Training

The Challenge

To maintain leadership and sustain enterprise business growth, STC must continuously increase the value offered to customers and improve IT operations. While recent increases of colocation services from five data centers fueled expansion, STC customers still demand new and differentiated services. STC crafted a strategy to market third-party PaaS and SaaS solutions hosted on a comprehensive STC IaaS platform, and began to recruit cloud partners. Pursuing this ecosystem-based strategy, however, required carrier grade availability, performance, scalability, and security while maintaining a cost structure that permits market leading price points.

About The Customer

With a strong focus on innovation and customer success, the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has rapidly grown over the past 18 years to become the largest service provider in the Middle East and North Africa. With fixed, mobile, broadband infrastructure and consumer and enterprise focused value propositions, STC operates in nine country markets and generates over $12 billion in annual revenue, giving the Saudi operator a solid foundation for long-term growth, even in challenging economic times. Core to STC’s expansion strategy are information and communications technology (ICT) services allowing customers to structure flexible and high value solutions that increase their business agility. A key component of this ICT based strategy is a rapid expansion into public and managed cloud services that allow customers to focus on their core business, as opposed to managing their ICT infrastructure.

The Solution

In early 2015, the STC Cloud Solutions team began execution on their strategy to build a public IaaS cloud and marketplace of PaaS and SaaS partners. Having selected OpenStack for integration flexibility and no vendor lock in, STC now needed a partner to help build and scale their offering. After an extensive search, STC selected Mirantis for their 100 percent OpenStack focus, and depth of expertise including code contribution, service, training, support, and extensive experience with large scale production deployments. STC first engaged Mirantis for requirements assessment and design, and then extended the relationship to include OpenStack distribution, training and deployment services. With Mirantis engineering support, STC deployed an OpenStack-based IaaS in their Jeddah and Riyadh data centers, which now offer customers a broad choice of operating systems and VMs, as well as server and storage size options.

Operational Impact

STC’s OpenStack deployment, across three data centers, is running on hundreds of servers and will soon grow to thousands.
Regional cloud demand is higher than expected and STC is able to comfortably meet customer needs with OpenStack based offerings.
STC’s internal adoption of OpenStack skill sets has been faster than expected. Already, it can deploy cloud services without Mirantis’ help.

Quantitative Benefit

STC states its OpenStack cloud capital and operating expenses are 25 percent below those of proprietary alternatives and likely to exceed that benefit soon.