Telkomsigma and Huawei sign deal (Image Credit: Huawei via PRNewswire)
(L) Leo Li (Regional Director of Huawei Data Center Solution Sales, Southern Pacific Region), Judi Achmad (CEO of Telkomsigma), Xu Ying (Director of Indonesia Data Center Solution Sales, Huawei Indonesia) and David Liu (Vice President of Huawei Southern Pacific Region) at the signing ceremony.

PT Huawei Investment (“Huawei Indonesia”) and PT Sigma Cipta Caraka (“Telkomsigma”), a subsidiary company of PT. Telkom Indonesia have signed an agreement for the provision of Huawei storage solutions. The intention of Telkomsigma is to provide a paperless solution for the Indonesian education system

Is Telkomsigma looking to build an education cloud?

Telkomsigma has three data centres with more than 12,000m2 of space located in Serpong, Surabaya and Sentul, from which they offer several data centre and cloud solutions to industry. This agreement will see it built a Storage-as-a-Service solution for Indonesian education. The intention is to turn the education sector paperless, providing a storage platform that will allow lecturers, teachers and students with a central repository to store all their documents.

There is no indication in the press release that Telkomsigma will be using the IBM document management system that their subsidiary PT Sigma Metrasys Solution delivers to its business customers. It seems likely that they will call upon their expertise though. IBM recently announced several industry clouds including education and it will be interesting to see whether Telkomsigma engage with them over this.

Huawei expanding its reach into the storage market

The Huawei storage solution chosen was the UDS OceanStor. This storage solution is built on ARM and was selected by Telkomsigma partly for its scalability. The OceanStor S2600T supports 276 drives and can store over 2 Exabyte’s of data while the OceanStor S6800T supports as many as 1,440 drives giving it capacity of around 11.5 Exabyte’s.

Judi Achmadi, CEO, Telkomsigma
Judi Achmadi, CEO, Telkomsigma

The OceanStor is a converged solution and part of Huawei’s push into the fast growing storage market. It comes with security built into the device, an important consideration for the education sector where data privacy is critical. The solution provides multi tenancy options and Judi Achmadi, CEO, Telkomsigma believes it to be the right choice commenting:

“This partnership has laid a solid foundation of the paperless of Indonesian education industry. The excellent functionality and performance of Huawei storage fully met our needs, delivering support and protection for future large-scale applications.”

Huawei has been gaining strength in the storage arena. A recent IDC report placed it seventh in the world but is also the fastest riser. There is still a long way to go before they can take the number one slot in a fiercely competitive segment where the top five (NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP and Dell) dominate the market.

As Huawei gain market share in their home region though they could start to place higher and with requirements in China likely to grow substantially over the next few years it will be interesting to see whether they can crack the US and European market.

Xu Ying, Director of Indonesia Data Center Solution Sales Department, Huawei Indonesia commented: “The cooperation is an important step for Huawei storage solution in the applications of Indonesian education industry. We are willing to maintain the long-term cooperative relationship with Telkomsigma, continuous optimization and innovation, contribute towards the development of education in Indonesia.”

The agreement was signed during the recent Huawei cloud congress. Huawei also signed an agreement with Commvault at the same event but it does not appear that Telkomsigma will be using it as the backup software. There is still work to be done on this deal so it will be interesting to see whether Huawei can bring a quick benefit to its new US partner by bringing them into this partnership.

Conclusion

This is a small win for Huawei, but they will need this and a lot more of them to climb up the storage rankings For Telekomsigma, creating and delivering a paperless education system will be interesting to see. This is not the first attempt to do this for education.The goal of a paperless office has long been promised but never achieved.

Malaysia had its own flagship project to deliver a fully electronic and paperless education solution over a decade ago but that has never been fully deployed. South Korea has also talked about doing this but even with the might of Samsung and other Korean technology vendors it has also failed to succeed. With a new generation of students whose lives revolve around their phones and tablets it just might be possible for Telkomsigma to pull this off.

There are concerns though, does paperless mean that handwriting becomes a thing of the past?  In the same way that a cashless society is now being touted as a possibility perhaps a paperless education system may now be a little closer to reality.

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