Orange Uses Cisco And VMware For Private Clouds

Orange Business Services, the hosting division of France Telecom, is offering to run private clouds inside customers’ data centres, which will be built from Cisco, EMC and VMware’s technology.

The Flexible 4 Business offering uses cloud services from EMC and virtualisation from VMware, to build private clouds. Orange Business Services will deliver four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions. This initially includes 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.

Cloud can ‘transform’ business

“CIOs are facing ongoing business challenges, but are now looking at the cloud and ways to embrace the cloud to transform their business and IT,” said Vivek Badrinath, CEO of Orange Business Services on a conference call. “Orange is a service provider that is bringing the best in class cloud technologies to organisations.”

“We bring together a combination of assets, to provide a rainbow of solutions to ensure full coverage of cloud rollout,” he added, promising a service which would be a simple installation, based on pre-assembled and pre-tested solutions from the four players. “All problems are taken into account from up front, which reduces complexity,” he said.

Orange Business Services hopes its cloud portfolio will allow enterprises to realise the benefits of having IT as a service, but without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure or exporting data to the outside world, which can bring heightened security concern, The service will also have tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

“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,” said Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum.

Cloud Hurdles

“Cloud computing unleashes the power of Cisco’s unique virtualised datacenter architecture to deliver highly secure IT services more efficiently across the enterprise,” said Robert Lloyd,  vice president of 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.”

Earlier this month Ian Gotts, CEO at business process management company, Nimbus Partners, warned that while CIOs may not trust the cloud, they have to offer a better service – or users will go to the ‘Stealth Cloud’ (i.e services that are initiated by staff without the knowledge, permission of support of the CIO).

Meanwhile the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has said that it wants to run a Governance Board to develop a code of conduct for cloud services.

Yet it is clear that there are still user concerns and confusion about the cloud, espcially around security. This point was highlighted by a poll of listeners to a webinar hosted by eWEEK Europe UK in June, which revealed that 56 percent did not believe the cloud was ready to be trusted yet. But the majority agreed that issues around security and reliability would be solved relatively soon, and many are looking to the cloud to simplify IT services.