Swisscom, the Swiss telecom, is going into the cloud business.
Its subsidiary Swisscom IT Services AG has signed up with Red Hat as a Certified Cloud Provider and launched a public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud targeting enterprise-class customers primarily in the Swiss market.
It's offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the hour or year for virtual machine consumption on the IaaS cloud.
Swisscom just posted its first quarterly loss in 10 years, losing $911 million largely because of a write-down in its Italian fixed-line unit impacted by the Italian debt crisis. It also pinched guidance on expectations of lower revenues and price erosion in its core market, which might explain it's interest in diversifying.