Orange Business Services teams with Cisco, EMC & VMware for cloud services

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 28 September 2010 11:51

IT Industry - Strategy

Orange Business Services, the global communications arm of France Telecom, has teamed up with the existing cloud computing partnership of Cisco, EMC and VMware to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for businesses.

Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and under the name 'Flexible 4 Business' will deliver four types of pay-per-use managed cloud services based on technologies from the four partners and will commit to tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

The partners claim that the single service provider model will enable customers "to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing management complexity."

The Flexible 4 Business cloud services portfolio will initially comprise infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), including private cloud and back-up services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), including security and unified communications services.

Cisco, EMC and VMware formed the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition in November 2009 to help enterprise customers build 'private cloud' virtualised data centres by offering, under the name 'Vblocks', complete data centre packages of integrated servers, storage, networking and virtualisation software.
Vblock Infrastructure Packages are pre-integrated combinations of Cisco blade servers and networking equipment, EMC storage and VMware virtualisation software designed to enable the creation of a cloud computing system 'out-of-the-box'.

Orange Business Services' IaaS offering will be based on these Vblock Infrastructure Packages hosted in Orange data centres sub-parties data centres or in customers' data centres. Related services will be managed by Orange Business Services on an "as-a-service" mode to "enable the expected flexibility in a highly secured environment."

Orange Business Services will also offer back-up delivered as-a-service and charged according to usage and security as a service: the provision of anti-virus and URL filtering as-a-service along with unified communications hosted and managed from Orange Business Services' data centres

Orange Business services says it has been "certified at the highest level by Cisco, EMC, and VMware to bring the network, server, storage, virtualisation and management expertise necessary to integrate the entire cloud solution on a global basis."

In August CSC announced that it would embrace Vblock as the preferred technology stack for cloud offerings to help its customers migrate their business processes to the cloud." However, that  announcement did not suggest the same close partnership with Cisco, EMC and VMware as that announced by Orange Business Services.