By Nicholas Greene
China’s Telecom Corporation Limited will join forces with IBM in a three-year agreement to deliver SAP cloud-based applications to the country’s small and medium businesses (SMBs).
The first clients will be those in the Guangdong province, China’s most populated region at 105 million inhabitants. From there, the project will extend to SMBs in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing and Tianjin.
The cloud-based SAP applications will also help China Telecom SMB customers who have or are planning to implement SAP applications to reduce their operations and management costs. Using cloud technology, these businesses will be able to accelerate implementation, providing scalability and elasticity to meet their individual needs.
China Telecom will manage clients’ infrastructures including networking, mobile devices and cloud resources. IBM will integrate the software, hardware and end-to-end service capabilities to create a complete environment to support SAP applications on the cloud.
IBM will also be tasked with providing both the skills education and tools China Telecom requires to provide support for its SMB clients through all phases of implementation, including testing, customisation and ongoing issue resolution.
IBM Greater China Group general manager and chief executive officer, D.C. Chien, said the announcement represents an important step in the Chinese cloud computing market, to provide one of the fastest growing segments within China with greater access to cloud resources.
“Our work with China Telecom will provide small-to-medium sized businesses in China with the means to more quickly deploy enterprise-grade cloud capabilities and assist them in driving innovation via the cloud,” Chien said.
