Hermes Datacommunications International Ltd., a company providing Wide Area Network communications to the upstream oil and gas industry, won a contract to support Tullow Oil plc. for their operations in Africa.

The 24-month deal sees the company use its pan–African satellite platform to provide a connection from Tullow Oil’s data center in London to its Ethiopia office in Addis Ababa, extending core services to the continent and growing the current services in Kenya.

Ian Theophilus, Global IS Infrastructure Manager for Tullow Oil explained, “Using a high power C-band footprint, a link has been provided between the Tullow Oil data center and Hermes Datacomms’ teleport, effectively putting my clients ‘on net’ to provide this service and creating significant capacity for future service. Completing the circuit is a VSAT connection from Hermes Datacomms’ teleport to a 1.8m C-band antenna on the roof of Tullow Oil’s Ethiopia office, plus full redundancy in Addis Ababa and automatic switching in the event of failure.”

Hermes Datacomms manages the service end to end, freeing up Tullow Oil resources to concentrate on their core business of servicing and supporting the user community to improve efficiency in oil exploration and production activities in the region.  Key monitoring data as well as day to day office functions can be accessed on the link to bring the remote users an HQ office experience.

Commenting on the deal, Account Director Bill Green said, “With our pan-African platform, Hermes Datacomms can provide extensive, cost-effective coverage throughout Africa bringing our users in the continent closer to home.”

www.hermes.uk.com