Whale Cloud, a subsidiary company of Alibaba Group, has signed a three-year contract with Zain Saudi Arabia (Zain KSA), the third mobile network operator in the region, to help the operator launch a public cloud service in Saudi Arabia. Whale Cloud will help Zain KSA to deploy, operate and maintain a public cloud platform and further assist the operator with vertical solutions to serve the enterprise markets.
The signing ceremony took place at Alibaba’s headquarter office on 26th September during 2019 Apsara Conference. Mr. Bao Zhongjun, CEO of Whale Cloud, and Mr. Saad Alsadhan, Chief Business and Wholesale Officer (CBO) of Zain KSA, were present at the signing ceremony on behalf of each party.
Whale Cloud will deliver a flexible and scalable public cloud platform by leveraging Alibaba’s Apsara Stack, a full-stack cloud solution, which offers flexible scalability, guarantees secure protection of enterprise data, and facilitates operation and maintenance management (O&M). Moreover, it provides AI platforms and supports elastic GPU computing services, making Apsara Stack an ideal platform to develop smart applications. This will allow Zain KSA to seize new business opportunities in the 5G and IoT era.
With this public cloud infrastructure, Zain KSA plans to offer its customers vertical solutions such as IoT under the brand "Zain Cloud". Whale Cloud will provide technical support to Zain’s customers.
"We believe this partnership will strengthen Zain’s capabilities in cloud-based services and help Zain to provide differentiated services to its customers. Whale Cloud will work closely with Zain to ensure Zain’s public cloud services stand out among its competitors," said Mr. Bao Zhongjun, CEO of Whale Cloud. "We hope this collaboration will be the first step in building a long-term partnership as we aim to be an important strategic asset to drive digital transformation for our customers."
"Zain will launch public cloud services in Saudi Arabia. We are enriching our service offerings and expanding our market landscape. We chose Whale Cloud to be our cloud service partner because we trust Whale Cloud’s expertise in telco IT and their experience in cloud-based services. Whale Cloud has successfully helped telcos to deploy, maintain, and operate cloud facilities around the world. We believe Zain is in good hands," said Mr. Saad Alsadhan, CBO of Zain KSA.