STC partners with Huawei to establish Cloud Partnership that aims to accelerate the cloudification journey for greater agility, efficiency, and Innovation

stc Group, the digital enabler in the region, has always been the hub and nucleus of innovation and evolution to stay ahead as a purposeful organisation. stc Group offers a variety of ICT solutions and digital services in several categories, including telecommunication, IT, financial technology, digital media, cybersecurity, and other advanced digital solutions. This has marked stc’s position as a digital transformation leader at the national and regional levels.

5G technology enables stc subscribers to benefit from higher uplink bandwidth, lowered user-traffic latency, and a higher level of security. But even more importantly, 5G investment drives the need for new and smart infrastructure deployment where the underlying goal is to have complete Cloud-Native infrastructure. Fast adaptation of cloud-native computing is an essential part of digital services provider transformation for stc – becoming more software-capable, innovating faster, and introducing services to the market quicker. Many expected new services would demand flexible underlying infrastructure, and cloud-native computing is a must. Furthermore, cloud-native computing transforms the cost of building and operating the network, i.e., the value of NFV-built flexible architecture compared to traditional monolithic purpose-built architectures is clear.

5G technology further enables MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing) deployment. From massive data processing in enterprise campus scenarios, real-time data processing in industrial control and autonomous driving, to immense IoT use cases requiring analytics localisation and, finally, better user experience for AR/VR/ cloud gaming consumer use cases – the edge is where services aggregate and is the natural extension of operator networks. This, again, demands drastic changes in the underlying infrastructure. stc’s cloud infrastructure team has envisioned new Edge-Native Infrastructure by embracing ETSI standard-driven MEC edge computing deployments, enabling stc to become both Cloud-Native and Edge-Native.

stc Group and Huawei assessed the opportunities of innovative B2B services that would support growth for stc, serving the entire spectrum of customers, from Small Office, Home Office (SoHo) companies to large corporations and government entities with dedicated B2B units. In developing these opportunities, stc Group is evolving from a mobile-centric operator to a full-service ICT player, advancing innovative mobile, fixed-mobile, fixed, IoT, IT security, and Cloud-based solutions to the private and public sectors.

Telco Cloud brings the following benefits:

• Successful resource integration of infrastructure and service application platforms, and transformation of the infrastructure into services, featuring Cloud Native

• Open and standard interfaces between layers and modules of Telco Cloud, avoiding lock-in of physical devices (computing, storage, network, and security devices) or virtualisation infrastructure by a vendor

• Enhanced service agility with containerisation and shortened time to market (TTM)

• Improved service deployment and O&M efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)

The partnership between stc Group and Huawei will not only provide infrastructure for the development of 5G B2B and B2C services. Still, it will continue to cooperate and innovate in service reliability, service agility, and automation, bringing advanced and mature business practices to stc networks. Driven by the vision of autonomous networks, automation is enabled in all scenarios, making service integration and deployment more agile and service O&M more efficient. Today the telco platform is equipped with considerable capacity, leveraging the way for commercial carried traffic, capacity enhancement and robust network connectivity.