Tencent Cloud has partnered with Nokia to help businesses in Asia Pacific (Apac) harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI).
The collaboration will create a more seamless integration between cloud services and network infrastructure, enabling Apac businesses – particularly enterprises, network infrastructure service providers and data centres – to upgrade and optimise their IT environments so that they are AI-ready.
A multi-cloud approach is necessary for AI to be widely used across an organisation. No single cloud platform is ideal for every AI workload and some AI workloads need to be on-premise or a private cloud due to data security requirements and regulations. However, managing multi-cloud can be complex. For instance, the networks between cloud platforms need to offer high performance, low latency, reliability and security to support AI workloads.
This is where the Tencent Cloud-Nokia partnership can help. Nokia’s multi-cloud data centre networking solutions can address multi-site and multi-cloud connectivity while delivering high levels of security, agility and scalability. Nokia can also deliver networks that sense, think and act, enabling them to be adaptable and automated to address some of the multi-cloud management complexities, shares John Harrington, Nokia's senior vice president for Asia Pacific for Network Infrastructure, at a media roundtable on the side of Tencent Cloud Day Singapore 2024.
With unified and optimised networking support, Tencent Cloud will be able to empower enterprises and operators to host and manage cloud-based applications and workloads that demand efficient computing, storage and infrastructure resources.
The cloud company is poised to offer high-impact cloud-based media and AI services — such as media processing capabilities, real-time communication and hosting for streaming and video-on-demand, and digital human creation — to meet the enterprises' increasing demands of handling multi-format digital data and content.
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“By combining Nokia’s network infrastructure capabilities with Tencent Cloud’s expertise, we are able to jointly offer end-to-end, optimised premium cloud services and networking solutions for the cloud and data centre industries in Singapore and throughout Asia. Together, we provide significant additional value to enterprises in the region, supporting their digital transformation journeys,” says Sang Xulei, vice president and head of Asia Pacific Regional Business Centre for Network Infrastructure at Nokia.
Meanwhile, Bluefin Zhao, vice president of Tencent Cloud International, Apac, states: “Enterprises with the foresight to adopt and harmonise cloud-based tools to actively pursue commercial results will be able to embrace the AI future. It gives them a strategic advantage over companies that still view cloud solutions as just an efficiency driver.”
To date, Tencent Cloud has helped improve the operations of regional companies including Singaporean lifestyle brand OSIM, Indonesian job platform KUPU, and Bank Neo Commerce Indonesia. These companies are supported by Tencent Cloud’s global infrastructure comprising 58 availability zones and more than 3,200 content delivery acceleration nodes, spread across 21 locations.