APAC Roundup: Akamai, NTT, Pacnet, Huawei, Ciena, Cisco

Here’s a quick rundown of news from the Asia-Pacific theater from this week, with four from China and one from Japan:

Akamai has a new partner in the world’s biggest market.  They’ve signed a strategic partnership agreement with China Telecom’s cloud division, CT Cloud.  CT Cloud will incorporate Akamai’s CDN and other services into a package aimed at Chinese enterprises looking to expand overseas In turn, China Telecom’s infrastructure will help extend Akamai’s ability to reach Chinese consumers.

Japan’s NTT Communications has launched new capabilities for its enterprise cloud portal.  They’ve added ‘immediate, on-demand’ management of the internet and VPN connections as well as for the cloud services themselves.  Sounds a bit redundant in terminology there to be both immediate and on-demand, but that’s marketing for you I guess.  NTT has put a lot of resources into its global cloud capabilities.

Pacnet sees the China wing of its business as so critical that it needs its own CEO.  Michael Xu has been appointed to lead Pacnet Business Solutions, the joint venture they set up to take on mainland China.  Not many foreign network or data center operators have gone beyond the partnership method to enter China’s internet infrastructure market.

Huawei has begun manufacturing for the Far East submarine cable system for Rostelecom.  When complete, the cable will bring as much as 1.6Tbps to the islands of Okha and Sakhalin in the Russian far east, connecting them to the Kamtchatka peninsula.  The 2 fiber pairs will span more than 1,900km and feature SD-FEC.  It’s due to be in place by the fourth quarter of 2015.

Ciena will be helping the Asia America Gateway upgrade its capacity.  AAG is deploying their gear for 100G in response to traffic growth between southeast Asia and the USA.  AAG has had its troubles this year with a couple of cable cuts off of Vietnam.

And just this morning, Cisco is apparently partnering with TCL to take on the Chinese cloud market.  The $80M joint venture, of which 80% will be howned by TCL, will build data centers in China and set up cloud-based video communication and collaboration systems for the enterprise market.  Cisco has been a target of Chinese ire in the wake of all the spying stuff, so cracking the Chinese cloud market indirectly like this is perhaps their most realistic way not to get shut out entirely going forward.

 

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables