Orange plans to initially focus on certain verticals including health care, public transportation and smart cities.
BARCELONA, Spain – Orange Business Services identified health care, public transportation and smart cities as three key verticals the company will target with its recently launched global public cloud service, offered via a partnership with Huawei.
Under terms of the agreement, Huawei will provide the hardware, develop the technology platform and OpenStack operating system, and provide “level three” support for the deployment. Orange will provide the data center facilities; network and security infrastructure; customer infrastructure and applications management; and professional services to support cloud migrations.
“This technology is provided to us as a turnkey solution but we put this technology in our ecosystem of data centers and connectivity infrastructure,” said Philippe Laplane, director of Orange Cloud for Business.
The carrier noted identifying key verticals was one important goal of the partnership with the Chinese vendor.
Orange Business Services is focusing its international public cloud strategy with a portfolio of services including advice, auditing, integration and managed services for cloud infrastructure and applications. The offering is designed to complement the carrier’s existing private cloud portfolio.
Laplane explained the portfolio will allow multinational corporations to migrate their legacy enterprise applications to the cloud and ensure their infrastructure and applications are available in all geographic regions in which they need to be hosted. The cloud service is scheduled for roll out across Western Europe and Southeast Asia over the next few months, followed by the U.S. in October. Launches in the Middle East and Africa are scheduled for next year. Orange Business Services plans to host two sites in Western Europe and an additional site in Singapore to serve clients based in the Asia-Pacific region.
“We aim to open a second site in Singapore by the end of the second quarter,” Laplane added.
Orange Business Services said it was also exploring hybrid cloud technologies under the agreement with Huawei.