STC clinches Data Centre - Telecommunications win at Middle East Technology Excellence Awards 2022

The NSO acts as a foundation for infrastructure programmability and automation. 

Telecommunications company STC won an award in the Data Centre - Telecommunications category at the recently held Middle East Technology Excellence Awards 2022 for its deployment of Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) software in partnership with Cisco. 

STC is expanding its use of automation at an accelerated pace to maintain its competitive edge,  accelerate innovation, and transform interactions with digital services. It is faring well in its automation journey with the current foundation for greater agility, security, efficiency, and innovation. 

Amongst the biggest issues for STC is the increase in costs for network operations. They noted that the growth of data centres and services is starting to outpace Network capabilities, making manual approaches nearly impossible. Up to 95% of network changes are performed manually,  resulting in operational costs two to three times higher than the cost of the network.  

As such, STC has taken the initiative to improve its business efficiency by deploying the Cisco®  NSO software platform to its current and future network as a foundation for infrastructure programmability and automation. This is to provide a highly efficient abstraction layer between network services and the underlying infrastructure components, even in complex,  heterogeneous environments. 

It can now quickly and easily design, provision, and apply changes across all data centres to accelerate service delivery to customers. 

Moreover, the technology accelerates service delivery to customers. Making the network more dynamic and the management more simplified frees up design staff for higher-value tasks and reduces human errors. 

Application programming interface (API) allows valuable data and functionality to be reused and combined with other APIs for different use cases. STC injected modularity and composability into IT and Network systems using Cisco's programmable infrastructure and automation tools—which can in turn create resiliency and futureproofing. 

“Managing networks in today’s fast-paced, agile IT and Network environments means enabling rapid and constant change without compromising reliability and performance has helped us accelerate our network automation initiatives and revolutionise our network engineering and operations processes,” STC Tech & Ops GCTO Haithem Al Faraj said.

The STC cloud team is continually evolving its programmes to meet the changing expectations of clients by delivering workflows that connect people, functions, and systems with self-service and faster request fulfilment. 

The prestigious awards programme honours outstanding companies in the region that have made exceptional contributions in the pursuit of technological innovation in their respective industries.

The Middle East Technology Excellence Awards is presented by Asian Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2023 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding contributions in pursuit of technological innovation, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected].