Dubai, United Arab Emirates – December 11, 2017 – Etisalat Digital, a business unit of Etisalat, and enterprise open source infrastructure solution provider, SUSE, have announced a new strategic Cloud Service Provider partnership for UAE. The partnership will enable Etisalat Digital to expand their cloud and data center product and solution offering across a range of platforms including VMware Cloud, Microsoft Azure and SAP solutions certified platforms.  As part of the partnership, Etisalat Digital will provide managed services for Linux and open source customers and will offer a range of SUSE’s software-defined infrastructure solutions such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP solutions for business critical big data analytics with SAP HANA and S/4HANA. These solutions can be deployed on public, private or hybrid cloud environments, and are designed to fulfil the most critical customer requirements.

“The partnership with SUSE adds critical capabilities to our offering and empowers us to provide innovative, more robust and certified software-defined infrastructure solutions within our cloud and data center solution”, said Miguel Angel Villalonga, VP of Cloud and Datacenter at Etisalat Digital. “By leveraging the SUSE portfolio, we can broaden our offerings for hosting and managing mission critical workloads for enterprise and government customers, creating an agile, always on business environment, and helping customers to achieve a zero-downtime environment and lower cost.”

“We have seen a strong appetite for cloud solutions in the UAE and worldwide, as big data and real-time analytics are driving IT transformation in the modern enterprise. The recent Cloud Report 2017 commissioned by SUSE shows that organizations are taking advantage of software-defined infrastructure (SDI), containers and DevOps to keep pace with the demands of today’s markets”, said Paul Abi-Chahine, Regional Director, EMEA East at SUSE. “The partnership with Etisalat Digital combines SUSE’s innovative enterprise solutions with the expertise of a world leading Cloud Service Provider, driving digital transformation by enabling enterprises and governments to become smarter through the use of the latest technologies.”

Customers deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Etisalat Digital public cloud will have the ability to: Increase agility while lowering cost: customers can convert upfront capital expenses to pay-as-you-go operational expenses. Whether migrating existing workloads or developing and deploying new applications, SUSE solutions ease the transition to the public cloud.

Adopt a zero-downtime model: The loss of a mission-critical application or service due to downtime is expensive whether applications are running in the cloud or an on-premise data center. Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions with SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Etisalat Digital cloud ensures that businesses stay up-to-date with the latest security patches, feature enhancements and bug fixes with a 24/7 support team. On-demand compute resources enable customers to extend their on-premises HPC cluster into the cloud when more capacity is needed. The easy to set up and use, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, eliminates anxiety over data loss with real-time synchronization that quickly restores clustered services and intelligent locking mechanisms that maintain data integrity, helping customers maintain continuity, protect data integrity and maximize uptime.

Manage the entire business in the cloud: Running SAP solutions in Etisalat Digital cloud on SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications, the leading platform for SAP solutions including SAP HANA, provides a reliable, manageable and highly available platform for all SAP mission-critical workloads. Jointly validated and certified by SAP and SUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, consistently delivers outstanding uptime and performance—even under full CPU loads and high memory stress. Integrated priority support and maintenance and extended service pack support, lowers the costs of operation and maintenance, and built-in business continuity eliminates single points of failure to protect business operations.