MANILA, Philippines - Telecom giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) has launched the first cloud computing services in the Philippines through the PLDT AppFarm brand.
“Cloud” is a network infrastructure that could utilize the public Internet or a private corporate network shared among a pool of users. By delivering applications “in-the-cloud,” PLDT AppFarm drastically simplifies the deployment of IT services by eliminating elaborate software, hardware and system investments usually needed to run these applications.
“PLDT AppFarm offers new value to its customers by lowering total IT infrastructure and management costs. As a result, companies will be able to refocus their IT efforts to further improve bottom line performance,” PLDT SVP and customer sales and marketing group head Eric Alberto said.
Meanwhile, PLDT first vice president and corporate business group head Nerissa Ramos explained that most of the value found in-the-cloud relies on the diverse strengths of infrastructure, platform and software service providers.
“PLDT AppFarm serves to fuse together the broad expertise from integration partners to bring powerful and proven solutions to your organization. This model allows for enterprise flexibility while ensuring non-disruptive cloud adoption,” she added.
One of the initial services that are growing out of PLDT AppFarm will deal with document management where customers can store, organize, and more importantly, secure all their pertinent documents and files. Another application will deal with managed web security, which will deliver ubiquitous protection from Internet threats to all PC users of any organization.
These are examples of Software-as-a-Service, which is currently the most popular service delivery model of cloud computing. Thousands of customers can use these helpful applications from just one portal, and they can do so without any upfront investment in servers or software licensing.
Eventually, PLDT AppFarm will deliver development platforms as a service. Programmers will then be able to build their own applications running on the PLDT AppFarm that they can deliver to their own customers.
PLDT AppFarm solutions will be offered immediately on a subscription basis bundled with PLDT’s broadband and private networking services.