Managed Cloud Services for Enterprise Collaboration

Managed cloud services can accelerate your business by allowing you to transform ideas into marketable products and services with greater speed. Cloud can provide nearly limitless scalability, enabling your business to grow without time and resource intensive IT build-outs.

Cloud can transform the economics of your IT -- from capital-intensive, to pay-as-you-go. Service level agreements guarantee the capabilities you need, when you need them. Costs are tiered and metered to accurately reflect your requirements and usage.

All applications, including legacy, run more efficiently and sustainably with greater utilization of the underlying infrastructure.

Cloud can make new business models possible and unlock revenue potential. Companies can enter new markets, respond more quickly to changing customer needs, collaborate more effectively to drive innovation and business value.

Collaboration Use-Case Scenario

• Global organizations face real collaboration challenges. Employee expertise is distributed across headquarters and regional and branch locations around the world. Technology and travel limit responsiveness to customer needs. Cultural differences hamper internal teamwork and organizational agility.
• Enterprise-wide collaboration is particularly difficult to improve due to the communications silos created by existing infrastructure and disparate technology environments.
• Rich collaboration enables organizations to extend services reach and improve relationships with customers. Poor collaboration can result in customer dissatisfaction and competitive exposure.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Cloud network-based collaboration strategies enable employees at all levels of the organization to connect and collaborate.
• Collaboration services built in the Cloud can also integrate with and enhance business processes and applications.

Application Considerations

• Proper collaboration architecture design relies on a thorough understanding of technology, people, and processes. The architecture must also be able to integrate with the desired business applications and processes.
• High-quality collaboration experiences require end-to-end solutions.

However, Cloud is neither an instantaneous nor simple transformation, but can be adopted in a controlled and pragmatic way. Cloud involves new technologies, new service and deployment models, and new IT skills sets and processes. Migration of legacy applications to Cloud can be a real challenge. That said, legacy platforms can co-exist with Cloud deployments and be migrated only as appropriate.

Moreover, Cloud does not always offer the best business solution. Some Cloud solutions limit the ability to customize functionality or cannot guarantee quality of service. Some workloads may have stringent compliance or technical requirements that demand other approaches.

Organizations will need to determine where Cloud applications are most appropriate, based on workload-specific requirements around cost, risk, and performance.

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Global Alliance Paves Way for Enterprise Cloud Services

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.

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.

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."

Managed Cloud Services offered 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."

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The Fundamental Power of Cloud Services

We live in a more connected and fast-moving world than ever before. Small business start-ups overtake established incumbents to dominate their markets with increasing speed. Developing countries leapfrog massive landline telecom investments and jump straight to mobile communications.

While our growing interconnectedness brings many benefits, it also sometimes means greater vulnerability and a heightened sensitivity to risk.

Increasingly we look to enabling technology to support both our personal and professional lives. As individuals, we expect instantaneous and ubiquitous access to communications, data, content, and applications.

We increasingly look to social media to inform our personal and business decisions. As business leaders, we expect technology to deliver cost efficiencies, improve customer experience, drive revenue growth, and foster innovation. At the same time, we expect constant availability and end-to-end security.

Evolving Beyond the Legacy IT Models
This combination of rising expectations and a rapid rate of change challenge traditional
approaches for information technology. Business cycles keep shortening, but business system complexity keeps escalating. Traditional information technology solutions are too often described as equal parts business accelerator and business obstructer.

A new approach is needed -- to free individuals and organizations from the constraints of traditional information technology. Many forward-looking executives now believe that Cloud Services are part of the answer and will play a central role in the next era of Business Technology evolution.

Cloud is a new computing paradigm. In Cloud, IT resources and services are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on-demand and at scale in a multi-tenant environment.

Cloud Services have several fundamental characteristics:

• Information technology, from infrastructure to applications, is delivered and consumed as a service over the network.
• Services operate consistently, regardless of the underlying systems.
• Capacity and performance scale to meet demand and are invoiced by use.
• Services are shared across multiple organizations, allowing the same underlying systems and applications to meet the demands of a variety of interests, simultaneously and securely.
• Applications, services, and data can be accessed through a wide range of connected devices (e.g., smart phones, laptops, and other mobile internet devices).

Cloud encompasses several variations of service models (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and deployment models (i.e., private, public, hybrid, and community clouds).

In the coming weeks and months we’ll be sharing some insightful customer use case examples of where and how cloud computing services can be applied to deliver business-oriented benefits.

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