Portugal Telecom’s (PT) data centre in Covilhã was unveiled to the public last month. A strategic decision taken five years ago plus a €90 million price tag is what it took the country’s largest telecommunications service provider to deliver a state of the art data centre that has been billed as one of the biggest of its kind on a global scale.

Much of the attention in the media coverage has been focused on the architectural features of the building, which help achieve high on the sustainability indicators along with the modern technologies ensuring the security of the facility. However, arguably the most exciting news for us came at the celebrations for the opening of the centre, when PT’s CEO, Mr. Zeinal Bava announced the launch of a public cloud that’s freely available to Portuguese citizens. He went on to further discuss PT’s ambitions for cloud business in a competitive marketplace.

These developments are an important step in the right direction for the emerging startup scene in the country. Services like this are one of the factors that allow for speedier conversion of tech based ideas into profit making businesses in the country. The startup community agrees. Luis Correia, co-founder of Popcorn Metrics - one of the 70+ teams participating in Lisbon Challenge, believes that it’s only possible to start and quickly scale up a product thanks to cloud services. Luis’ product enables non-technical people to set up website metrics and track user behaviour. And all this is up in the cloud. “Without cloud services, we would have build our product with entirely different structure, which would have cost us much more money and time. So it’s great to see a strong local company like PT give people access to such a crucial tool that can give an edge in the increasingly competitive field of technological startups” - added Luis.

Meo Cloud is available here.