Proximus NXT rewarded for its Cloud innovations

Proximus NXT rewarded for its Cloud innovations

On December 4th, during the 12th edition of the Gala IT One, Proximus NXT won the "Cloud Innovation of the Year" award. We met with Thomas Scherer, Chief Architect at Proximus NXT, to discuss the main initiatives which led to this recognition, but we also focused on the upcoming trends of the ICT sector.

Can you look back at your 2018 year and the initiatives that led to the implementation of your innovative cloud solution?

By observing the market's needs in terms of Cloud, Proximus NXT decided to put emphasis on hybrid cloud, offering to combine public with private cloud services in an integrated fashion. This hybrid cloud strategy has led to three main initiatives. First, Proximus NXT is partnering with the most important public cloud providers, namely Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Proximus NXT has developed the necessary competencies to help its customers to transition to the cloud. Second, Proximus NXT has invested in private instances of public cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure Stack, and also Cisco Container Platform, which is equivalent to the Google Kubernetes Engine. The objective is to provide customers a uniform experience in the private and the public cloud. Third, Proximus NXT is evolving its private managed cloud offering, U-flex. New components have been selected with a hybrid cloud mindset, such that resources can be managed in an equivalent manner regardless if they reside in U-flex or in the public cloud.

How to convince companies that have not yet opted for the cloud to take the plunge?

Actually, it is the opposite. We see growing interest in public cloud from our customers. Yet, customers are uncertain of the value it can bring and have concerns regarding security & data confidentiality when outsourcing to the public cloud. Ultimately, from a customer’s perspective, the effort to sort out those points may render the transition to the public cloud too costly. That’s where we can help. We have expertise in identifying cost reduction and revenue growing activities for our customers to qualify and quantify public cloud advantages. Proximus NXT offers its hybrid cloud service portfolio to manage security related and regulative matters.

What are the main advantages of your cloud solution?

Certainly our status as a regulated entity. This facilitates cloud adoption, be it public or private, significantly when it comes to achieving compliance. Our customers are not required to deal with contractual matters with public cloud providers anymore: we implement transition and even more important exit strategies, and provide best practices for data confidentiality.

Are other developments and initiatives under consideration? What are the main trends that you are closely monitoring?

Cloud – with its ease and high degree of abstraction and automation – allows reducing workloads significantly on infrastructural elements. Hence, more focus can be put into business centric applications. Therefore, Proximus NXT has setup a Digital Finance Solutions financial solution team to offer services and applications to financial industries. Moreover, Proximus NXT customers have an increased appetite in cloud native services, such as Big Data, machine learning and AI, which are as well topics we do address.