China Telecom, the country’s largest fixed-line carrier, said its internet data center revenues jumped 34.8% year-on-year to 4.19 billion yuan ($664 million) in 2011, thanks to the strong growth of its cloud services, according to company executive.
“Cloud services has became the major growth driver of our IDC revenues and this year we will further expand our cloud service offerings to different market segmentations “China Telecom president and chief operating officer Yang Jie told reporters in Hong Kong last week when the company announced its annual results for 2011.
As cloud computing becomes a new growth driver for the operator’s revenues, China Telecom has set up a new subsidiary to manage and operate all of the operator’s cloud computing business and initiatives across the country, Yang noted.
The new subsidiary, to be in operation in April, will integrate and centralize all the cloud businesses currently operated by the group’s provincial companies. It will initially offer cloud services such as IaaS and cloud storage to its enterprise customers.
China Telecom, which has already deployed cloud computing in internal and external applications since 2000, announced a cloud strategy in 2011, under which the operator will integrate all the data centers distributed across the country and build a national, integrated data center platform in early 2012.
Separately, China Telecom announced that it has teamed up with Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) to jointly offer cloud computing services, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, in China by the summer of 2012, as part of its ongoing cloud initiatives.
Throughout the partnership China Telecom will be able to use IIJ’s expertise in cloud computing services, while IIJ will benefit from China Telecom’s data and network infrastructure.