Microsoft's cloud rises in Qatar

Microsoft today held a roundtable on Cloud Computing for the key CIO’s hailing from various prominent organizations in Qatar in association with its partners HP and Citrix.

The roundtable offered CIO’s a different angle to approach technology utilisation in their organisations while moving their IT infrastructure into the Cloud. The roundtable also provided the CIOs with insights into how they could make the shift to cloud computing with a private cloud architecture which can dynamically allocate IT resources across business units, so that services can be deployed quickly and scaled out to meet business needs whenever they occur.

At the roundtable Microsoft and HP discussed how companies can take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Computing immediately through a joint initiative called the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track programme. Microsoft and HP are simplifying technology environments with solutions built on a Infrastructure-to-application Model as part of a $250million joint investment. With this initiative Microsoft and HP have partnered in jointly developing and marketing to provide full benefit of integrated platforms and solutions to customers. Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program is one of the first outcomes of this joint investment along with the Business Decision, Data warehouse and Messaging appliances that HP and Microsoft announced and launched in January.

“Many of our customers have expressed interest in the benefits of cloud-computing such as fast deployment, increased agility, lower costs but with tighter control over significant factors such as the physical infrastructure and security policies. In association with prestigious partners, our private cloud offerings fulfill our customers needs at the infrastructure level, while providing a clear migration path to cloud services at the platform level.” said Mohammad Hammoudi, Country Manager, Microsoft Qatar.

Ayman Dwidar, Blades Business Manager, ME, Mediterranean and Africa, HP said: “Through our partnership with Microsoft, we can offer ready-made, fully-integrated packages and solutions to accelerate our customers’ journey to Private Cloud. Using this Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track solution readily available today, customers can realize a Private Cloud environment in just 30 days. HP has a huge interest in the Qatari market and we are definitely looking at increasing our investments here with a new office that is already opened. This also means strengthening our existing relationship with Microsoft.”

For customers looking to implement a private cloud strategy, the Hyper-v Fast Track programme provides all of the necessary elements — including an interoperable server, virtualization, management and security capabilities through HP BladeSystem Matrix, Microsoft System Center and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization solution to provide customers with a proven foundation for running business applications within a private cloud computing environment. Microsoft and HP also demonstrated the transformational approach to build a private cloud where both companies offer assessment, planning, and deployment offerings for the evolution of the existing datacenters. For customers that don’t want to wait to complete the full transformation of their datacenter towards Private Cloud, Hyper-v Cloud Fast Track provides the quick switch to the full power of Cloud with integration to the existing infrastructure within their datacenters.

Mohsin Shafique, Sales Manager, Qatar & Oman, Citrix said, “Today’s event demonstrates how Microsoft, Citrix and HP are partnering in a truly integrated manner to facilitate a Cloud environment and how we can better extend our reach to all customers. Citrix has been doing applications virtualization for over 20 years which gives us great experience in the industry. End-user concerns have shifted and it is now more about maintaining applications and desktops in a datacenter and delivering it anywhere and anytime.”

Mark Chaban, Director of Private Cloud, Microsoft Gulf said, “The Private Cloud environment provided by Microsoft, HP and Citrix ensures quick deployment that is flexible, elastic to the public Cloud and scalable across different systems. From this partnership, customers will get best of breed solutions, guidance and Return on Investment (RoI).  The journey to Cloud requires strong alignment and partnership and we are committed to providing this to all customers.”

The Microsoft and HP Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track programme helps reduce infrastructure deployment time, enables dynamic flexing of physical and virtual resource pools, and delivers comprehensive management of Hyper-V virtualized infrastructure and applications.

Comments

Comments