Orange, Cisco, EMC and VMware to Pave the Way for Easy Cloud Computing Adoption

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business, to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables.

Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners. The Flexible 4 Business cloud services portfolio will initially be composed of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, including private cloud and back-up services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, including security and unified communications services.

Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing management complexity. The end-to-end cloud services offered by Orange Business Services bring together best-of-breed technologies through the Flexible 4 Business alliance that are pre-integrated and pre-tested to deliver higher application performance across the enterprise.

The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together four complementary IT and communication leaders with long-standing collaborative relationships who have a history of delivering innovative solutions that solve the business challenges of enterprise customers. Orange Business Services is certified at the highest level by Cisco, EMC, and VMware to bring the network, server, storage, virtualization and management expertise necessary to integrate the entire cloud solution on a global basis. As the service provider in all Flexible 4 Business engagements, Orange Business Services will commit to tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

“Orange Business Services has a long heritage in providing managed datacenter services and hosting and has combined this with its networking and security expertise to provide a growing suite of cloud computing services,” said Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum. “The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together leading players in cloud computing so enterprises can have the confidence that solutions, including private cloud, are delivered and managed on a global scale to the highest standards.”

Cloud services to be delivered by Flexible 4 Business:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):

• Private cloud: Customized solutions based on Vblock Infrastructure Packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, together with a comprehensive service catalogue (computing, storage, operating systems, middleware) based on platforms hosted in Orange datacenters, sub-parties datacenters or in customers datacenters. The related services are managed by Orange Business Services on an “as-a-service” model enabling the expected flexibility in a highly secured environment.
• Back-up services: Highly secure hosted and managed back-up solution delivered as-a-service: evolving and charged according to real usage, enabling customers to benefit from an effective solution that grows with their requirement and does not require initial investments.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

• Security services: Enable the ability to offer anti-virus and URL filtering solutions as-a-service. These SaaS solutions enable all users to benefit from immediate protection even when out of the office, and for customers to roll out precise security policies within seconds.
• Unified communications services: Comprehensive unified communications solution hosted and managed from Orange Business Services datacenters to reduce costs. Services are available from all types of terminals. Administrators can allocate services as required and therefore adapt usage and costs to the precise needs of the company.