Int’l Roundup: Infinera, Akamai, Tata, Orange

Here’s a quick rundown of some interesting news on other continents so far this week:

Infinera has picked up a data center interconnect deal out in the Far East. Equinix has picked their Cloud Xpress gear to hook up its three Hong Kong data centers. Infinera has been looking at data center interconnection in the metro as one of its growth markets going forward.

Akamai picked up a new CDN partner over in Europe this morning. They’ve teamed up with the Italian incumbent Telecom Italia, which will be offering Akamai’s CDN and web optimization to Italian companies. We’ve heard less about this sort of telecom/CDN partnership in the last year or two, but the underlying economics and technologies are still very much interrelated.

Tata Communications has partnered up with Salesforce.com for a bit of cloud connectivity. They’ll be supplying direct connectivity between enterprises and Salesforce’s cloud CRM solutions via their IZO platform. Salesforce joins the public clouds of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in hooking up to Tata’s network for better global enterprise reach.

And Africa may see some substantial telecom M&A in the near future, although the major players aren’t actually African. France’s Orange said yesterday that it is in exclusive talks with India’s Bharti Airtel to purchase Airtel’s businesses in the African nations of Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville and Sierra Leone. Orange already has an extensive presence in Africa of course, and is clearly looking to boost that further.

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