Chinese technology giant Huawei announced this week a strategic partnership with Russia’s Sberbank to provide cloud services for Russian businesses.

The clients of SberCloud.Advanced are projected to range from large businesses to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups. They will have access to 37 new cloud services, which will be fully integrated into one system.

According to Huawei’s Director General in Russia, Wang Wei, the deal with Sberbank could significantly improve Russia’s digital prospects.

“This partnership truly represents a landmark for the Russian cloud services market,” he said.

State-owned Sberbank has been steadily transforming itself from banking to online services.

SberCloud Director General Evgeny Kolbin explained that “This is an exclusive offer for the market, consisting of interconnected cloud services complementing each other, which gives the client a single convenient approach to using these services, a variety of the most modern IT platforms, as well as built-in tools for monitoring and controlling the cloud infrastructure.”

Ren Zhengfei’s telecom behemoth has been developing its relationship with Russian companies over the last few years as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin bring the countries closer.

Sberbank said the platform is a unique solution in the market due to its high level of service integration and security.

The strategic partnership is the first “on this scale between Russian and international cloud providers,” according to a Sberbank statement released on Tuesday.

Sberbank Cloud Advanced will offer 37 cloud services integrated in one platform, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), according to the statement.
Sberbank said that users will be able to set up and manage complex IT infrastructures such as big data clusters and automatically create, scale, and manage applications.

The platform will target small, medium, and large businesses, as well as small startups.