To meet business imperatives of speed:

Dialog launches Cumulus

by Rohana Jayalal

Dialog Axiata PLC launched Cumulus, a cloud service, with several technology companies including Ericsson, EMC, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard, Kingslake, and Microsoft, at the Dialog head office in Colombo on Wednesday.

Group Chief Officer, Dialog Enterprise, Jeremy Huxtable said, “The services we provide are cost effective, easy to use and will support growth of Sri Lanka’s business community and economy. With the support of our partners we will deliver world-class IT services at a fraction of today’s cost.”

The event also marked the setting up of a business solutions hub service for the SME sector.

He said that they are quite confident of the future and will always introduce state-of-the art technology.

The Cumulus cloud service provides services such as virtual IT infrastructure, enterprise storage and data backup, messaging solutions, development platforms, device management, business applications, productivity solutions, and managed security solutions.

The cloud service is designed to meet the business imperatives of speed to market, cost efficiency, agility and innovation.

“Cumulus brings together the knowledge and strengths of Dialog’s best-in-class communications technology, delivering unmatched broadband connectivity options, and modern cloud infrastructure of global technology partners, to provide businesses with a truly local cloud experience, built to global standards with the unmatched Dialog service promise,” he said.

At present, the available applications will include an e-mail server, a web client, a content management framework, a customer relationship management system and a content management platform in one integrated and easy to access interface.

With Managed Enterprise Cloud, Dialog will serve all enterprise customers and consolidate other third-party application offerings with one unified platform, enabling efficient provisioning and significantly improved time to market.

“With Cumulus, Dialog provides local cloud space for all ICT needs, including products, solutions, and services, to suit the needs of large enterprises and small and medium businesses,” a company spokesman said.

Its hosted solutions portfolio includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) offers. Dialogs iDC services includes co-location services via its three data centres.

In October, Dialog entered into agreements with the BOI to invest 175 million dollars in Sri Lanka’s ICT infrastructure.

The investments are in third generation and fourth generation high speed Broadband services and further development of the group’s Fibre Optic Transmission network, international telecommunications network, and digital satellite television infrastructure.

Dialog is the largest foreign direct investor with investments of over USD 1.96 billion, he said.

Huxtable said the launch of Cumulus, Dialog’s local Cloud platform, builds on the investments that have already been made in data centres and connectivity.

Head of business development, ASIA DirectFN, Reza Shah said that Dialog has provided them with a state-of-the-art innovative hosting solution “to manage a mission critical stock brokering application for stock brokers in Sri Lanka.”

“We have found these solutions to be economical and scalable, meeting the demands of clients. The ISO 27001: 2013 certified data centre of Dialog offered us the added confidence in achieving information security expectations for our solutions. Dialog’s agile and innovative solution backed by its enterprise support processes, also offer us the opportunity and the freedom to decide on future expansion,” he said.