The companies, which have formed a strategic partnership to promote the service, will begin marketing in Europe before moving on to Asia.
The partnership has no plans yet to market the service into North America, given AsiaInfo’s ownership.
“We are interested in the North American market, but perhaps not the traditional telecoms market,” said Andy Tiller, vice president of product marketing at AsiaInfo.
“The service is already in the Amazon cloud and we have done a proof of concept with customers. It would be a very quick way for a greenfield operator to start up, but we have not aimed at that sector specifically.”
Telenor is the only announced customer for AsiaInfo in Europe, but has the system on its own servers for its operations in Denmark and Hungary.
The offering includes carrier-grade billing and customer relationship management services and it is believed to be the first time that such software has been deployed in a public cloud environment for mission critical telco operation.
AsiaInfo will provide the cloud service via Amazon Web Services’ servers in Germany and Ireland, said Tiller. It will provide the full suite of software, not a stripped-down version, he added. “It is exactly the same software as we deploy to customers’ own data centres, and is highly configurable.” Customers will pay for what they use, he said.
“We will comply with European data privacy laws. The logic is you use Amazon instead of your own private data centre.”
Amazon is more than a host for the software, said AsiaInfo. The two companies are working together on development, training and marketing. “We’ve chosen Amazon because of its credibility and worldwide availability. We are collaborating in R&D with Amazon,” said Tiller.
“It’s quite feasible we could announce a customer this year,” he said.
