Four heavy hitters are teaming up in an alliance that aims to boost cloud computing. Orange Business Services, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware have formed Flexible 4 Business to offer end-to-end computing services for the enterprise.
As its name suggests, easy transition is the goal of Flexible 4 Business. The alliance hopes to convince companies to move into the cloud with the promise of infrastructure flexibility, cost reductions, and business performance optimization.
“Orange Business Services has a long heritage in providing managed data-center 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 clouds, are delivered and managed on a global scale to the highest standards.”
Delivering Cloud Services
The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together complementary IT and communications leaders with existing collaborative relationships. Executives from all four companies are heralding the alliance — and how their solution works with the others to streamline cloud-computing migrations.
Orange Business Services will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions the alliance offers: Private cloud and backup services and security and unified communications services. Orange CEO Vivek Badrinath is sure the alliance will make cloud computing a “reachable reality for global enterprises” by offering security and mitigating the complexity of technical migration.
Team Cisco-VMware
Cisco is providing the unified communications and security piece of the puzzle using its virtualized data-center architecture. Robert Lloyd, executive vice president of worldwide operations at Cisco, said the alliance brings together four industry-leading companies with global expertise to offer customers a comprehensive set of cloud services.
VMware is providing VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, and VMware vCloud Director to the alliance….