June 3, 2009 (WAM) -- Etisalat today announced the opening of 2 new Data Centres in Al Ain and Dubai adding a total of 10,000 sq.feet of premium data centre floor space equipped with the entire spectrum of redundant infrastructure to expand its total commercial hosting capacity to 50,000 sq feet which is the largest in the GCC. With this latest announcement , Etisalat extends its leadership position in the Data Centre Market with a total of 8 Data Centres with high speed fibre connectivity across the UAE and highly available international links through its redundant international fibre network and EMIX(Emirates Internet Exchange).

Etisalat plans to double this capacity and will add 100,000 sq.feet of data centre space in the next three years. The new data centres will serve a rapidly growing customer base from the region looking for a comprehensive service provider to capitalize on the competitive advantages of hosting their IT equipment in a secure, reliable, highly available, and scalable environment at cost effective price points.

Etisalat's data centre customer base is a diverse one and caters to multinationals, government bodies as well as local companies in various key sectors like Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, Airlines, Banks and Financial institutions.

"We are constantly striving to raise the bar in providing quality IT infrastructure outsourcing services for organizations to capitalise on," said Abdulla Hashim, VP, Business Solutions, Etisalat. Our network of Data centres across three cities in the UAE represents an integral component of our "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" strategy to make hosting a more compelling alternative for organizations vis- -vis on-premise deployments." Moving up the value chain, the focus of the new data centres would be delivery of unmatched value proposition to clients via a prudent and comprehensive portfolio of hosted and fully managed value added services like Managed Servers, Hosted Business Applications, Hosted Security, Storage-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery, and round-the-clock network and security monitoring and management. Etisalat has also been on the cutting edge of hosting technologies by successfully piloting its On-Demand Computing and Virtualization services and intends to launch these commercially by the fourth quarter of this year.

Mr.Hashim added, "Given the challenging economic environment, we are seeing rapid adoption of our eHosting '&' Cloud Computing services as companies move towards entrusting their systems to established data centre specialists rather than building their own so that they can achieve their strategic IT objectives without risking capital expenditure on top-tier data centre infrastructure." In line with its overall strategy, Etisalat has put together several strategic alliances to enrich its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) value proposition. Etisalat currently offers vulnerability management and email security as part of its SaaS offerings and is working on a roadmap to offer additional business applications to cater to market needs.