TIM bets on Cisco to take Noovle into the big leagues

TIM’s new enterprise cloud unit Noovle has provided more detail about its partnership with Cisco, which it hopes will turbo-charge its push into the market.

Under the agreement, Noovle and Cisco will collaborate on cloud infrastructure and migration services pitched at businesses large and small, as well as public administrations. Among other things, the deal gives Noovle access to Cisco’s co-innovation centre in Milan, which focuses on cybersecurity and data privacy. Meanwhile, Cisco will benefit from Noovle and TIM’s nationwide enterprise sales channels, and the fact that TIM has 17 data centres spread across the country, with a further six planned.

“Together, we want to make sure that the cloud combined with the network is a solid strategic platform, on which Italian businesses can rely in order to face the challenge of relaunching – by transforming the need to adapt to new scenarios and hybrid working environments into leverage for competitiveness,” said Paolo Campoli, vice president of Cisco’s Global Service Provider unit. “To do so, we must develop a secure and highly automated infrastructure to integrate network and cloud, which guarantees security for the applications and services it supports, for any user, anywhere, with any device.”

Noovle launched in January with the aim of turning over €1 billion in 2024, and generating EBITDA of €400 million. At the time, Noovle reeled off a bunch of strategic partners in addition to Cisco, including Atos, Citrix, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and VMware.

This week’s partnership announcement with Cisco puts a little more flesh on Noovle’s bones.

“We are providing the public and private sectors with automated platforms and cloud solutions that allow customers’ needs to be managed, from connectivity to services,” said Noovle CEO Carlo d’Asaro Biondo. “The activities and projects that we will implement alongside Cisco are in line with the Group’s wider objective to contribute to Italy’s digitisation.”

TIM isn’t the only European incumbent to have updated the market lately on its cloud progress.

Deutsche Telekom late last week revealed that its latest data centre in Amsterdam has begun offering commercial services. The 21,000 square-metre site will mirror the operator’s facilities in Biere and Magdeburg, Germany, offering the kind of redundancy that enterprises crave.

The developments come as ABI Research in April predicted that public cloud will inject new life into the telco cloud sector, which is expected to grow into a $29.3 billion market by 2025.