stc Collaborates with Cisco to Accelerate stc’s Cloud Journey for Greater Agility and Efficiency

• stc, Cisco, and Solutions by stc entered into a multi-year collaboration in December 2021.
• Goal is to build a unified, software-centric cloud services stack that includes infrastructure hardware, automation, virtualization, service assurance, and orchestration tooling.
• Telco Cloud infrastructure across stc data centers built to enable the delivery of telco services from a consistent platform.

stc and Cisco announce that stc is expanding the use of cloud at an accelerated pace to maintain its competitive edge, foster innovation, and transform interactions with digital services. As stccontinues its cloud journey, it is building on the current foundation for greater agility, security, efficiency, and innovation.

The collaboration with Cisco will be a key component to stc realizing their ambitions for the 5G future. By pursuing a cloud-first approach and transforming their stacks into cloud-native architecture using the Cisco cloud platform, Redhat Openshift Container Platform, full automation suite, and DevOps Digital pipeline, stc will be able to offer high quality and better telco applications while reducing the time to roll out new services. In addition, stc will be able to quickly integrate cloud-based apps and features targeted to specific customer segments. 

“As a leading digital operator in the region, we have achieved a lot of transformative change in a short time. We have an opportunity with our cloud-first approach to improve the economics of 5G&Cloud stacks to transform the way we are dealing with our network to create faster and more compelling experiences at scale. We work together with Cisco seeking new ways to drive market differentiation and deliver business outcomes through agile, secure infrastructure, at every stage of the technology journey,” said Eng. Anwar I. Alsubhi , Cloud infrastructure GM, stc.

“With this collaboration, our Telco Cloud solution will help accelerate the deployment of the next generation of secure, agile digital services. This will drive innovation around stc’s multivendor workload services and further strengthen its digital transformation efforts,” said Adam MacHale Vice President, EMEA Service Provider, Cisco. 

stc's cloud platform provides the automation for the virtual environment with management and operations capabilities to provide a complete yet open and vendor-agnostic platform backed by proven system integration capabilities and expertise in the telco market and poses higher requirements on platform efficiency, operation agility, and SLA reliability. 

In the first phase, Cisco built the Telco Cloud infrastructure across stc data centers to enable the delivery of telco services from a consistent horizontal platform, supporting an array of software and critical network applications. This was designed to increase the speed of software upgrades and releases​, and automate processes through embedded features in the Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) layer with key characteristics, including the efficient automation of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline and automated lifecycle management operations of cloud-native functions over a managed software defined infrastructure. Cisco CX played a central role start to finish, from providing architectural ownership and overall integration of the solution, to solution testing, delivery and workload deployment, driving innovation in CI/CD-driven automated onboarding and providing a next generation assurance framework. 

The new achievements underpin stc’s goal of maintaining a leading role in fulfilling KSA’s digital transformation, as part of the Vision 2030 development program. The move aligns with stc’s commitment to continuous, customer-driven innovation and to deliver highly reliable, cost-effective and secure cloud services while focusing on the delivery of large-scale network services that meet its customers’ evolving needs.