Photo: SES

SES has signed a new deal with one of the biggest telcos in the Middle East to help companies accelerate their digitalization plans, involving Microsoft and the cloud. SES announced Oct. 13 that the Carrier and Wholesale Services (C&WS) division of e&, formerly known as Etisalat Group, alongside SES and Microsoft, will host a co-located SES O3b mPOWER and Microsoft ground station at Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE. The first O3b mPOWER ground station in the region will facilitate one-hop connectivity to the cloud from remote sites so that customers can optimize their global business operations smoothly.

This trio partnership will mean that e& network services can be connected and extended via SES’s second-generation Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation – O3b mPOWER – which aims to deliver high-speed connectivity services from tens of megabits to multiple gigabits per second to one site. The connectivity to Azure Cloud and SES’s satellite network aims to enable simplicity, flexibility and minimize network latency delays.

“This partnership is an important milestone in providing customers with the ability to optimize business operations in a flexible and agile manner while accessing connectivity to the cloud from remote sites via satellites and leveraging e&’s global network with space coverage. e& will capitalise on the success of O3b mPOWER satellites to deliver fiber-like connectivity to meet growing customer demands globally,” Nabil Baccouche, group chief Carrier & Wholesale officer of e&, said in a statement.