Orange Expands Its Cloud Across The World

Orange Business Services (OBS), part of the France Telecom group, has today launched a worldwide expansion of Flexible Computing, its enterprise cloud infrastructure service.

The product is primarily aimed at European multinational companies, and should help OBS hit the target of €500 million in cloud computing revenues by 2015.

Flexible Computing is already available to European customers on a pay-per-use basis. Users can choose a service managed via a personalised web portal, or let Orange take complete care of their cloud.

OBS says its product is more comprehensive than the market leader, Amazon Web Services, since it includes many enterprise-grade ‘extras’, such as built-in firewall, private VLANs and round-the-clock support, at no additional cost.

The orange cloud

OBS already has 500 European customers relying on its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products. Today, the company is expanding its reach, to enable multinational businesses to buy all of their communications and IT products from a single provider, wherever they are based.

OBS describes Flexible Computing as a scalable and modular solution, able to meet “fluctuating demand and dynamic business growth”. And its pricing model means customers only pay for the resources and services they actually use.

The global expansion of Flexible Computing will be powered by data centres in North America and Asia.

“Orange Business Services created a global IT infrastructure in the cloud to match our international business on the ground,” said Bai Ping, president of Tiens Group, one of the early adopters of the service. “We have become a more agile organisation as we continue to grow globally, and that is all due to the depth and scope of the Flexible Computing service provided.”

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