Technology & IT | Monday 9 March, 2015 12:34 pm |

The Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Cisco announced today that they will strategically collaborate to build three new data centers in response to growing market needs to accelerate and streamline cloud adoption in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The deployment, which will represent the largest Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) installation in the Middle East to date, will help STC to deliver operational efficiency, rapid deployment for customers across the board as well as ensure higher availability in a secure environment thereby guaranteeing increased customer satisfaction

This deployment is a major milestone for both companies already long standing relationship. Cisco and STC will build the three data centers at the district level in both Riyadh and Dammam.

STC is looking to help customers in all sectors to achieve new level of productivity, agility and cost saving through cloud adoption and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a data center and cloud solution which offer full visibility and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, all built around the needs of applications. It is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. It delivers improved operational efficiency, greater productivity, accuracy, and easier scaling as well as improved security for customers. It will help to break down silos and unify all the component parts of its IT infrastructure – networking, storage, compute, network services, applications, security– thereby managing them as a single, dynamic, entity without compromise.

Cisco ACI data center switching innovations will allow STC’s network to rapidly respond to its application development teams, while delivering up to 75 percent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant silicon-based switches and software-only network virtualization solutions.
ACI accelerates application deployment cycles to drive faster business processes and improve bottom line results.

Executive Quotes:
Eng. Abdulaziz A. Alsugair, Chairman and Managing Director, STC
“As a leading provider of ICT services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, STC’s goal is to maintain its leadership position by continuously innovating to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. This pioneering Data Center project will ensure that we continue to deliver state-of-the-art network infrastructure to support the tremendous growth and demand from our customers in Saudi Arabia for fixed and mobile broadband bandwidth. The new data center solutions will allow STC’s IT infrastructure to meet business demands for new applications as well as accelerate application deployment cycles to drive faster business processes and improve our customer offering.”

Eng Mohammed Alabbadi, General Manager, Cisco Saudi Arabia
“We are honored that STC has chosen to continue to work with Cisco. Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure will help STC to deliver new products and services, manage risk and security threats, empower employees, and drive productivity into their organization. As billions of new valuable connections form to create an Internet of Everything (IoE) that most of us will experience through applications, the focus on rapid and consistent application deployment today has become even greater. Through this groundbreaking Data Center project, STC is demonstrating that it understands the vital importance building a technology infrastructure that will address its customers’ growing and ever changing demands today. ”