Orange Business Services is accelerating its international cloud strategy with a new global public cloud offering that includes advice, auditing, integration and managed services for cloud infrastructure and applications. The services, delivered in partnership with Huawei, complement the existing Orange private cloud portfolio and will help enterprises in their digital transformation initiatives.
The principal aim of the international cloud strategy is to help multinational corporations migrate their legacy enterprise applications to the cloud and ensure that their infrastructure and applications are available in all geographic regions in which they need to be hosted.
The new cloud services will roll out across Western Europe and Southeast Asia in April 2017, followed by the US in October 2017. The Middle East and Africa are scheduled for 2018.
The partnership with Huawei capitalises on the strengths of OpenStack technology, an open-source software platform for cloud computing. Open standards and interoperability are key to meeting the demands for large, scalable public cloud solutions by delivering economies of scale and avoiding the danger of proprietary lock-in. Orange has partnered with Huawei because it is a leading player in the OpenStack arena and at the epicenter of the platform’s ongoing development.
The new public cloud services will complement the existing Orange private cloud portfolio. This provides a further opportunity to provide high-performance integrated hybrid cloud services. To guarantee maximum levels of security of their cloud infrastructure, customers will be able to rely on the services and expertise of Orange Cyberdefense.
In terms of service delivery, Orange will provide the datacentre facilities, network and security infrastructure, customers’ infrastructure and applications management, and professional services to support cloud migrations. Huawei will provide the hardware, develop the technology platform and OpenStack OS, and provide level-three support.
“Our customers have a genuine need for an international public cloud offering that will allow them to adapt to the uses imposed by new technologies and meet the challenges of transforming their IT services on a global scale. To continue to support them, it is essential for us to have the best technology, combined with the highest levels of security and services, that can meet the challenges of both digital transformation and international development.”
“By collaborating with Huawei’s OpenStack experts, we are providing a secure and flexible platform built on an open architecture which will enable seamless end-to-end services, less vulnerability to tie in and ultimately more choice,” explains Philippe Laplane, Director of Orange Cloud for Business, Orange Business Services.
The election of Gold Directors on the 2017 OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors has confirmed that Huawei again held a seat on the board. Out of 24 gold member candidates, Huawei was one of eight foundation members to gain a seat. Re-election to the board demonstrates Huawei’s increasing influence within the OpenStack community and the Foundation’s recognition of Huawei’s contributions to open-source activities.
The OpenStack Foundation Board includes eight Gold Directors who are elected by the Gold Members of the OpenStack Foundation at the beginning of each year. The Board of Directors has a great deal of influence over the direction of OpenStack.
Huawei joined the OpenStack Foundation in 2012 and became a Gold Member one year later. In 2016, because of its commitment to the OpenStack community, Huawei became the first Chinese provider to obtain a Gold Board seat. In 2016, two Huawei-led open-source data protection and cascading solutions projects became official OpenStack projects. Multiple companies have participated in these projects, which provide leading solutions for cloud-based data protection, unified cross-cloud management, and interconnection among heterogeneous clouds.
Huawei currently has six project team leads and 19 core members in the OpenStack community. In the Newton release, Huawei ranked sixth globally in terms of completed blueprints and first in China in terms of the overall contributions, significantly improving its influence on the technological development of the community.
Huawei has invested many resources into the promotion of OpenStack in order to improve China’s influence in the global open-source field and aid in the development of open-source technology. Huawei has collaborated with Intel to host OpenStack Bug Smash activities, led Chinese developers in fixing bugs, and helped to safeguard OpenStack releases. Huawei was an active participant in the first OpenStack Days China, presenting several customer best practices, and receiving recognition from the OpenStack Foundation.
With its global sales and service platform, Huawei’s OpenStack-based cloud OS FusionSphere serves customers in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, finance, the government and public sectors, media, and manufacturing. At a time when many enterprises are building their own private clouds, Huawei has introduced OpenStack into the public cloud. Huawei has built the OpenStack-based public cloud platform for Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and China Telecom, and provides OpenStack-based public cloud services on its self-operated Huawei Enterprise Cloud platform.
Ren Zhipeng, President, IT Cloud Computing & Big Data Platform Product Line, Huawei, said, “Huawei seeks to adopt a customer-centric strategy in the cloud service industry. Huawei has embraced the open-source community and its strategy moving forward is to provide services based on open-source technology, introduce enhancements to open-source technology, make contributions to open-source technology, and work with its partners to build an open ecosystem. Huawei aims to build an open, ‘win-win’ cloud computing ecosystem and enable the digital transformation and business success of enterprises and carriers.”
Orange Business Services, the B2B branch of the Orange Group, and its 21,000 employees, is focused on supporting the digital transformation of multinational enterprises and French SMEs across five continents. Orange Business Services is not only an infrastructure operator, but also a technology integrator and a value-added service provider.
It offers companies digital solutions that help foster collaboration within their teams, collaborative workspaces and mobile workspaces, better serve their customers enriched customer relations and business innovation, and support their projects enriched connectivity, flexible IT and cyberdefense.
The integrated technologies that Orange Business Services offer range from Software Defined Networks SDN/NFV, Big Data and IoT, to cloud computing, unified communications and collaboration, as well as cybersecurity. Orange Business Services customers include over 3,000 renowned multinational corporations at an international level and over two million professionals, companies and local communities in France.
