Alliance Between Orange Business Services, Cisco, EMC and VMware

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’ mode 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.

"Cloud computing has truly come of age with Flexible 4 Business," said Vivek Badrinath, chief executive officer, Orange Business Services. "Today’s business alliance will make cloud computing a reachable reality for global enterprises, providing for our customers’ security requirements and mitigating the complexity of technical migration. Orange Business Services has built its reputation catering to the global business needs of multinationals. With industry’s top cloud players we will ease the migration for our enterprise customers."

"Cloud computing unleashes the power of Cisco’s unique virtualized datacenter architecture to deliver highly secure IT services more efficiently across the enterprise," said Robert Lloyd,  executive vice president, worldwide operations, Cisco. "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."

"Architected properly, customers can benefit from having their own private clouds seamlessly integrated with service provider clouds to deliver on the promise of providing unprecedented gains in operational efficiency, quality of service and business agility for Enterprise IT," said Howard Elias, president and chief operating officer, Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services, EMC. "This expanded partnership combines best-of-breed technology and service from four industry leading companies. With Vblock as the core to the cloud service coupled with complementary IT services based on EMC’s industry-leading storage platforms and backup and recovery software, customers will have more choice and flexibility as they take advantage of cloud computing services."

"We are pleased to expand our partnerships with Orange Business Services, Cisco and EMC," said Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of global field operations, VMware. "This new business alliance will leverage industry-leading cloud infrastructure technologies underpinned by our VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server and VMware vCloud Director virtualization solutions to deliver IT as a service for enterprises – helping them achieve greater levels of availability, reliability and agility in a secure, scalable cloud platform."