Branding may turn out to be an issue, but 4’s are definitely wild for a formidable team of technology providers and their initial package of four, “cloud-based” service offerings. As described here, Orange Business Services, the subsidiary of France Telecom that specializes in “wholesale”, or “B2B” communications services, will market packaged integrations of “cloud-based” technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMWare.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Orange Business, Cloud Computing, Unified Communications, Cisco