Cloud Computing

The alliance is aimed to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises and help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables. Orange Business Services (News - Alert) 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 alliance will provide following cloud services:

•Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
•Private cloud
•Back-up services
•Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert))

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 (News - Alert), 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).

In a press release, Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum, said, “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. 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.”

Robert Lloyd, executive vice president, worldwide operations, Cisco (News - Alert), said, “Cloud computing unleashes the power of Cisco’s unique virtualized datacenter architecture to deliver highly secure IT services more efficiently across the enterprise. This business alliance brings together four industry-leading companies with complementary global expertise to offer our customers new choices with a comprehensive set of cloud services built on Cisco’s innovative Unified Computing System and Cisco’s industry-leading collaboration and security applications.”

Recently, Orange Business Services was in TMC (News - Alert) news when the company selected Riverbed Technology as a technology partner for its Enterprise Application Management service.

Sujata Garud is a TMCnet freelancer with three years of writing/editing experience and two years of market research experience. As an editor she has covered the IT, electronics, banking, pharma, construction, mining and healthcare industries. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda