MTN Group yesterday, in Johannesburg, South Africa, announced it would be the first African company to offer Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect to business customers across multiple countries on the continent.
The new service will leverage the extensive footprint of MTN’s Global MPLS network, to provide customers with connectivity between their data centres or businesses and the AWS EU Ireland region. This will give enterprises across Africa a dedicated link with which they can access the flexible, scalable and reliable AWS cloud.
“The relationship with Amazon Web Services is an important step in our plans to address the needs of enterprise customers in emerging markets, particularly Africa,” says MTN Group Chief Enterprise Officer, Mteto Nyati.
“As MTN Business, our purpose is to enable and inspire growth on the continent. We believe that by working with a global technology leader such as Amazon Web Services, MTN will be better placed to enable customers to grow their businesses by providing them with reliable connectivity and access to world-class digital solutions,” says Nyati.
MTN’s Global MPLS network connectivity offers improved manageability, reliability and performance. As a result, AWS Direct Connect is expected to bring significant benefits to multinational and large enterprise customers by providing a more consistent network performance when they access AWS.
”We are excited to be working with MTN to bring the security and reliability of AWS Direct Connect to customers across Africa,” said Steve Midgley, Head of EMEA, Amazon Web Services Luxembourg Sarl. “By utilising AWS Direct Connect customers are able to reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput and provide a more consistent network experience helping African businesses of all sizes to rapidly expand their organisations.”
AWS Direct Connect is not the first time MTN will dabble into data and cloud services. The company’s head has in fact been firmly stuck in the cloud for years. The telco has been acting less and less like one for years, partnering with Google in Nigeria to get businesses online before veering off and trying to sell them web hosting by itself, and investing in data centers to power a cloud business product it dubbed “anything as a service”. If its short-lived liaison with Google in Nigeria is any indicator, MTN’s current relationship with Amazon might last only as long as the company feels it needs the handholding of a leading cloud player.
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