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Telcos play a large part in how new technologies play out, which makes their conspicuous absence from the ranks of cloud success stories all the more puzzling. “How did we let a bookseller corner the market?” asks Sunny Tan, Assistant Vice President of Enterprise Business Group – Solutions, StarHub (Singapore’s second-largest info-communications operator) and the head of its business solutions.
For StarHub, the decision to enter the cloud was more evolution than revolution. “It was a natural extension of our data center business. We already had the space, the facility; we knew how to build data centers and redundancy. We saw a lot of telco-IT convergence; in terms of customer purchase behavior, they wanted to buy solutions from us instead of hardware and connectivity separately.”
The operator took its first steps into the cloud in 2010 through the offering of SaaS solutions, including accounting, HRM, and sales systems, delivered though a utility model to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).
In February 2012, StarHub collaborated with Huawei in the launch of their public IaaS cloud, branded as Argonar, which offers on-demand scalability in computing and storage with carrier-grade connectivity.
“Thanks to the collaboration with Huawei, we now have a highly-scalable public IaaS cloud suitable for all sorts of cloud computing purposes. Combined with telco’s reliable network connectivity and security, a lot of customers will find it very advantageous to host mission critical services with Argonar.”
