27.2.2013
Hrvatski Telekom, for the first time at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile tech show held this week in Barcelona, showcases its service – the virtual shop ICT Marketplace.
It presented the service yesterday evening, in cooperation with NEC Corporation, the leading company in the area of integration of IT and network technologies, which implemented the ICT Marketplace platform for Hrvatski Telekom. This is the first cooperation between Hrvatski Telekom and NEC and the first ICT project of EC in this region.
Hrvatski Telekom offered ICT Marketplace, a high-technology virtual shop of business applications and ICT services, on the Croatian market in December 2012. ICT Marketplace is intended for all business customers – from small enterprises to large companies, regardless of their business activity. It provides fast and easy access to cloud services at a one-stop shop and includes search, trial and lease of applications required for daily business, which helps customers avoid large capital investments and provides them with higher efficiency because they can better focus on their core business.
“Benefits of this model are widely applicable which is why it can be implemented anywhere in the world,” said Mirela Šešerko, Operating Director of the Information and Communication Technologies Business Solutions Sector of Hrvatski Telekom. “By means of ICT Marketplace HT wants to expand its offer of cloud services, including video conference, interactive virtual classroom and a number of other solutions as a one-stop shop. For customers this means that now they can procure business applications and infrastructure in a fast and efficient manner, in the amount they need and precisely when they need them. The idea behind the model is also to shorten the time of delivery as much as possible, for example a virtual server or a virtual computer is available in 15 minutes at the most.
Nicolae Varvara, NEC Vice President in charge of Carrier Business in NEC Europe commented: “With this cooperation NEC takes another important step in the cloud solution marketplace. We hope to expand this service to other DT Group operators in Europe, helping them to use the cloud solutions to open up new business opportunities. The project has made it possible for Hrvatski Telekom to expand its offer of innovative services with an efficient model that reduces time-to-market and supports business customers, from small enterprises to large companies, by breaking down the barriers they face when implementing new IT solutions.”
NEC Cloud Service Broker is a proven cloud management and aggregation platform which simplifies delivery of cloud services. It was developed by NEC’s Cloud Competence Center in Spain and has been integrated in HT’s Data Center and billing systems. As part of the deal, NEC also manages selection and integration of selected business applications from NEC’s partner application catalog, focusing on those that are best suited to the Croatian market.
With its Cloud Competence Centers in Spain and Japan, NEC has pioneered the delivery and activation of SaaS, DaaS and IaaS solutions for telecom operators with more than 20 commercial projects in Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific region. NEC continues to capitalize on its experience in the integration of IT and network technologies in order to expand its cloud service portfolio for telecom operators.
Hrvatski Telekom has established a partnership model providing domestic programmers with the opportunity to offer their applications through ICT Marketplace, and in this way offering to its customers applications created in accordance with specific local market needs.