A new partnership has been agreed between Telefonica Digital and Etisalat, the telecoms firms have announced.

The deal will see the two companies collaborate across several digital services.

Their partnership will focus on the development of business opportunities, while it will also relate to product licensing in areas such as M2M, cloud computing, video services and digital advertising.

Announcing the move, Telefonica said Etisalat shares its desire to drive innovation in the mobile sector.

Both firms recently gave their backing to Mozilla's Firefox OS - a planned operating system for mobile devices based on HTML5.

By collaborating with the largest operator in the Middle East, Telefonica hopes to expand its digital operations into 17 new countries.

Telefonica Digital chairman Matthew Key said: "Like us, Etisalat recognises the enormous potential of digital services for our sector. We strongly believe that open collaboration and partnership is the best way of driving innovation and delivering the best products and services to customers across our combined footprints."