MTN has said that it has established the MTN Group Cloud Centre of Excellence and Project Nephos that will carefullly migrate selected business applications to Microsoft Azure.
According to the firms, this was coming after the five-year strategic partnership signed in September 2022 between MTN and Microsoft.
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They stated that this had birthed a programme of works that would see the latest technologies deployed for the benefit of MTN’s customers, starting with South Africa and Nigeria.
A statement by MTN Group said, “The core of the programme will focus on migrating BSS and OSS applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud aiming to realise operational benefits and cost efficiencies.
“Work has already begun with the establishment of MTN Group Cloud Centre of Excellence and Project Nephos to migrate, carefully selected, business applications to Azure. MTN and Microsoft will work closely with Accenture who will be providing technology implementation, integration, and support services to successfully enable the migration and operations of the targeted environments.”
It disclosed that one of the cornerstone elements of the programme was the migration of EVA, MTN’s extensive core big data platform, to Azure.
MTN explained that beyond infrastructure optimisation, it would evolve its common data model to enable use cases that bridge typical divides across network, IT, and commercial domains taking advantage of native Azure capabilities, including machine learning and artificial intelligence.
MTN Group Chief Information Officer, Nikos Angelopoulos, said, “Our strategic partnership with Microsoft will enable us to transform the way we deliver products and services to our customers.
“We will bring the power of cloud computing to life driving development and innovation with speed, flexibility and predictable investments and operations. We remain focused on nurturing the digital skills within MTN and in the societies we operate in and building digital platforms to drive digital transformation across Africa and the Middle East.”
The Communications, Media and Technology Lead for Accenture Africa, Nitesh Singh, added, “Harnessing the power of MTN, Microsoft, and Accenture, we will be working closely together to build the next wave of compressed digital transformation across the continent. We see this program becoming a global standard in the industry for years to come.”
MTN noted that by working together with Microsoft and Accenture, it was taking a new approach to the deployment of workloads to the public cloud.
It added that this approach had already enabled it to complete a proof of concept for a 5G standalone core network solution deployed in Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.
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