Four different services, in two different categories are offered. Two services, “Private Cloud” and “Backup services” fall into the “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) category. “Security Services” and “Unified Communications” are considered part of the “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) offering. According to promotional material, this pre-packaging is designed to provide a simple, pay-per-use means to adopt a cloud-based approach to enterprise computing and communications.

Orange Business calls “Flexible 4″ an end-to-end service that offers the services of best-of-breed technology providers in pre-tested configurations. We’ll see how that plays out in the marketplace, where such out-of-the-box or standard solution sets still must be tweaked to interact and interoperate with existing technologies and multi-vendor solutions. Support of “private clouds” is an important development and the Flexible 4 approach will minimize capital spending over time, the question is whether it has the potential to eliminate the need for professional services to integrate with existing technologies.

All told, it just doesn’t feel that flexible.

The Business Together program brought Cisco more tightly into the mix of products and services positioning Communicator as a single point of entry for real-time, multi-modal communications including IM, email, and mobile telephony. The Cisco connection starts with Cisco branded IP-phones that facilitate both presence indicators and “click-to-call” call initiation among other employees or business partners with contact lists associated with Microsoft’s OCS, Outlook, Office suite or SharePoint software. I believe Microsoft’s Active Directory server must be involved as well.

Meanwhile, Aspect Software continues to chronicle advancements in OCS deployment both internally and externally. As part of the inside game Aspect continues to illustrate the adoption and use of OCS throughout its company on this site. [As a brief aside, it looks like "federated" IMing has a long way to go.] For outside consumption, Aspect announced general availability of a suite of software called UC for the Contact Center. This instance extends OCS-based IM into the contact center to facilitate functions like “Ask and Expert”. It also marks the marketing debut of Tellme (Microsoft’s IVR subsidiary) as the integrated speech application service provider (ASP) for “hybrid” voice self-service deployments.

Both approaches are designed to accelerate deployment of applications built on a decidedly Microsoft-flavored approach to Unified Communications. For Aspect, UC is a Microsoft-only proposition, with tight integration to Aspect’s suite of inbound and outbound customer care software suites and workforce management software. Orange Business has a number of other approaches, including an instance of Genesys Customer Interaction Management to support multivendor environments.