Chairman and CEO of EMC Corporation meets with CEO of Saudi Telecom Company

The two leaders discussed ways to help STC achieve its growth plans and business goal to deliver optimal value to its customers in both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and throughout the world, by developing a next-generation virtualized data center.

EMC, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is one of the first companies worldwide to order an EMC Symmetrix V-MAX system to form the foundation of its virtual datacenter.

STC, the largest telecommunication provider in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, began using EMC's technologies in 2002 to manage approximately 70 terabytes of information. Since then, STC has since grown its entire information infrastructure to more than two petabytes. To address its continuous data growth, resulting from an increasing subscriber base and broader offerings, STC relies on a variety of EMC technologies to store, protect and archive its customer data efficiently. EMC also has provided STC with a high-end business continuity and information management solutions for reliable and continuous access to its data, in addition to applications that maintain high levels of service while significantly reducing costs and increasing STC's return on investment.

"With subscriber numbers on the increase and a healthy demand for new telecoms services in the Kingdom, STC has to ensure the availability, reliability, efficiency, scalability and security of its infrastructure," said Saud Al Daweesh, STC's CEO. "Over the past seven years, EMC solutions have provided us with reliable and cost-effective access to customer information, which is critical to STC's continued success."

Joe Tucci, Chairman, President and CEO, EMC Corporation, said:

"EMC is committed to work with leading companies like STC in the design and building of efficient and scalable virtualized information infrastructures that help them achieve optimal utilization and value from their investments. With its adoption of the new EMC Symmetrix V-MAX system, the world's largest high end storage array, STC will have a flexible, dynamic and energy-efficient information infrastructure that enables it to achieve its targeted quality of services and to deliver value to their customers."

STC continues to be a pioneer in information infrastructure technology adoption. The new EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture integrates industry-standard components with unique Symmetrix technologies and capabilities to deliver massive scalability - hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage, tens of millions of IOPs (input/output per-second) supporting hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage system. This system also incorporates self management to automate storage functions, enables resources to be added on demand and uses less energy per terabyte of data stored than traditional systems.

STC services an area of 2 million square kilometers, providing coverage across more than 100,000 kilometers of highways and 98% of the inhabited areas within Saudi Arabia (population of Saudi Arabia 26 million).

In addition, STC has a larger customer base than any other telecom service provider in the Middle East, with more than 18 million GSM customers, 4 million land line customers and one million DSL customers.

To date, STC has won telecom licenses in Kuwait and Bahrain and acquired share holdings in various telecom companies in Turkey, Indonisia, Malaysia, India, and South Africa and is continuing to develop its outreach to become a global service provider.