At Mobile World Congress, Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), a leading mobile and data service provider in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, announced that it has awarded Cisco a contract to modernize its enterprise and data center networks. The deployment of Cisco's next-generation network solutions comes as a major step towards Mobily's evolution to full software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructure which will drive new customer services and greater business agility. As part of its strategy to expand its services and cater to evolving customer requirements Mobily will deploy Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to increase IT efficiency, streamline security tasks and improve scalability for future growth. The step is considered a key milestone for Mobily toward evolving to a full software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructure that will accelerate application deployment and significantly reduce operational costs through policy-enabled workflow automation. "Our relationship with Cisco over the years has enabled us to generate maximum value from our investments in network architecture," said Eng, Maziad Alharbi, Chief Technology Officer at Mobily. "The adoption of Cisco ACI is a significant step for in the evolution of Mobily's services and infrastructure. With incremental growth in the demand for data, this modernization drive will better position us to provide our customers with a wider portfolio of high-quality telecommunications services and further our standing as a technology leader." Cisco's ACI will help accelerate Mobily's time to revenue for new services, reduce total cost of ownership and strengthen the service provider's ability to rapidly meet customers› evolving needs. In addition to yielding significant cost savings, turning the manual process of provisioning and delivering applications into a simplified, automated process will also enhance security compliance and customer experience. Security policy automation will improve Mobily›s capability to isolate and protect workloads and allow security controls to be implemented closer to the data they are intended to protect. "We are honored to work closely with Mobily to develop a robust ecosystem that supports their strategy to transform their network and operations, and which enables them to increase business agility and pursue new areas of growth," said Andy MacDonald, Vice President Global Service Provider, Middle East, Africa and Russia, Cisco. "Software-defined networking is becoming an increasingly important strategic imperative for Mobily as it continues to expand its networks and services and develops an infrastructure that can address customers' needs well into the future." Cisco ACI provides a new SDN approach to provide Mobily the networking agility it needs to drive service innovation, while increasing productivity of IT staff and line-of-business employees, all at a much lower cost than that of its legacy datacenter environment. Mobily is among the top telecom operators in the Middle East that provides wide international roaming internet services through Fourth Generation (LTE) technology, in partnership with 124 operators representing the largest telecom operators in 56 countries around the world. — SG
