Telefónica steps up cloud with VMware, Huawei

Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica has activated a new cloud solution for the business segment using VMware's virtualization technology over Huawei's servers installed in Telefónica's data centers.

Telefónica's Virtual Data Center (VDC) 3.0 portfolio is available to companies in Spain, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and the United States.

In Brazil, the portfolio was named Vivo Cloud Plus 3.0. Vivo is the trademark of Telefónica Brasil.

The solution is mainly aimed at Telefónica's medium and large customers, those who require infrastructure services and who need to mobilize workloads to the cloud. Basically, it allows companies to have a dedicated physical environment with the same characteristics of a virtual data center.

With the launch, Telefónica aims to become the first company in Latin America to offer a fully automated hybrid cloud with VMware technology. VMWare reportedly has 80% of the global virtualization market.

The new version of VDC adds features such as automatic scaling and plan scaling, which adjust to peak demand. It also offers middleware applications such as service and disaster recovery as a service. Services are interconnected between different data centers.

A market is available to businesses to purchase as a service and a portal is available to VDC customers to manage the cloud infrastructure deployed in their various local nodes.

At a press conference in São Paulo, executives detailed the strategy. Telefónica wants to be a major hybrid cloud provider. The objective is to gain scale by selling the solution to corporations already hosted in Telefónica data centers or by making use of the companies' network services.

According to Fábio Costa, CEO of VMware Brazil, VDC 3.0 is 20% more efficient than Microsoft's Azure cloud solutions and Amazon Web Services services. Plans in Brazil start with 300 reais.

Alex Salgado, Vivo's B2B vice president, said the solution costs Brazilian reais 10 to 30 percent less than competitors' similar products.

At the end of this year, Telefónica plans to launch a new cloud enterprise solution, Cloud Foundation, aimed at customers looking for a fully hybrid environment, even in their infrastructure.