All 4 one and...
We're reasonable confident that networking leader Cisco, Storage leader EMC and virtualization leader VMware have all collaborated before, but it came as a bit of a surprise to their cloud computing offerings being provided by mobile giant Orange.
To be precise this is Orange Business Services we're talking about and the four of them have just announced a business alliance called Flexible 4 Business - see what they did there - which offers a buzzword bingo dream: end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises.
What does this mean? Businesses are offered four cloud services:
- Private cloud - A combination of virtualization, networking, storage and computing technologies hosted in Orange datacenters. More concisely referred to as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
- Back-up services - Hosted and managed remote backup.
- Security services - Anti-malware and URL filtering delivered on a SaaS model.
- Unified communications - Remotely managed UC.
"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." Representatives of the other players all made very similar statements.
This move comes as traditional partners of the quartet are trying to offer more of the enterprise ICT services package themselves. HP issued a press release today crowing that some of its own datacenters were now entirely free of Cisco equipment. Meanwhile Oracle wants to get more into hardware and IBM just bought a networking company.
