Category Archives: Orange

Capgemini, Cloud computing, cloud de confiance, Digital Transformation, Europe, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Orange, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Regulation & Government

Capgemini and Orange launch ‘trusted cloud’ Bleu for competitive French market

Capgemini and Orange have announced that Bleu, a cloud company launched in partnership with Microsoft, is engaging commercially with ‘select French public and private organisations’ in anticipation of services going live by the end of 2024. Bleu, which is described as ‘fully operational’, was launched with the goal of meeting specific cloud needs of various… Read more »

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5G, Europe, Inria, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, Orange, Virtualisation

Orange creates NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G advances

Orange and Inria are partnering on an NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G

Orange and Inria are partnering on an NFV, cloud testing lab for 5G

Orange has unveiled its new lab dedicated to network virtualization and cloud computing, called I/O Lab. It’s targeting an open and accessible environment for collaboration with the wider industry.

In a particularly buzzwordy announcement, the telco has claimed the new testing environment for NFV and cloud tech will enable advances in the development of 5G, IoT and Big Data; while also referencing “fog” computing – a form distributed cloud computing where near-user network edge devices are utilised for storage – and Mobile Edge Computing.

“The networks… will undergo a radical transformation in the next decade as a result of the progress of virtualization techniques,” Orange said in a statement. “General purpose servers will be able to use software to incorporate more and more network functions, all while meeting the networks’ growing needs for capacity and reliability. At the same time, cloud computing techniques will contribute to the development of flexible storage and processing capacities in data centres and even within networks and their peripheries, including connected devices and objects.” This trend could be strengthened by the increased momentum of the Internet of Things and Big Data processing”

“The I/O Lab’s vision is to develop a coherent, flexible and reliable management structure for the networks of the future, seen as distributed communication, storage and processing infrastructures. This will be achieved by virtue of the dual distributed network and software culture of its partners and a large contribution of the worldwide Open Source communities.”

The lab has been developed in partnership with Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, and the two companies say the test-bed will be dedicated to contributing heavily to relevant Open Source communities.

Orange also claims the lab will promote and develop a broad scale network OS, called “Global OS”, which will be designed to support a variety of app development for the infrastructure, including security, performance, availability, cost and energy efficiency management. It has also targeted 2020 for tangible outputs from the lab in terms of network infrastructure ready for 5G-compatible deployment.

AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lithium, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Orange, Sarwar Raza, SDN, T-Mobile, Telefónica I+D, Virtualisation

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.

Actility, Foxconn, Funding, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Olivier Hersent, Orange

Orange, Foxconn among LoRa IoT startup Actility backers

IoT partnerships are in full swing this month

IoT partnerships are in full swing this month

A group of tech companies including operators Orange, KPN and Swisscom and manufacturing giant Foxconn have put $25 million into Actility, an IoT startup focused on the LoRaWAN standard, reports Telecoms.com.

With the IoT land grab fully underway there are already calls for standardisation and collaboration as everyone looks to get an early piece of the action. The LoRa Alliance was unveiled at CES at the start of this year to support LoRaWAN low-power WAN technology. Minimising the amount of power required by IoT modules is considered critical if they’re to have the multi-year battery life required for embedded applications.

This $25 million round of funding was led by Ginko Ventures, which is a consortium consisting of the above tech companies and some VC players. The stated aim of the investment is to accelerate the go-to-market strategy for Actility’s ThingPark open standard IoT network solution.

“I decided to create Actility in 2010 based on the intuition that M2M would become much bigger and the need for carrier grade M2M infrastructure,” Actility founder and chief exec Olivier Hersent told Telecoms.com. “In terms of technology we have worked a lot with a technology call LoRa, which is one of the fastest growing alliances, on the LoRaWAN standard.

“ThingPark provides the technology to connect both long range and low power sensors over unlicensed ISM band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of IoT networks for a wide range of IoT applications. We are delighted to have secured the backing of such prominent communications industry leaders.”

“Foxconn Group is transforming to be a high technology solution provider, including hardware and software value creation. Through this strategic investment, we will expand our current collaboration with Actility to bring its LoRaWAN technology and IoT Platform and Solutions to Taiwan, China, and the rest of Asia,” said Fang Ming Lu, executive vice president of Foxconn.

“This is a technology that comes at the right time for operators to accelerate the connection of objects,” Jean-Paul de Weck, CEO Swisscom Broadcast. “There is set to be a huge increase in the demand for IoT and we see Actility as a key partner as we expand our activities in this market.”

The feeling among Actility and its investors is that LoRa could well become the default IoT technology worldwide, and that it will only become so if it is open to all players. The commercial applications of IoT at this early stage tend to be more industrial, such as smart metering, remote monitoring and logistics applications. By seeding the market the aim is to prove the commercial viability of such IoT implementations and build momentum.

The announcement coincides with a flood of other IoT collaborations. Vodafone is partnering with EMC to develop an IoT testing platform, while Samsung yesterday announced a partnership and investment in Sigfox, which seems to be competitive with LoRa and already has some commercial networks, with a new one being rolled out by Engie in Belgium. Finally the Weightless SIG, yet another prospective IoT wireless standard, also picked this week to announce the deployment of a Weightless-N Smart City network in London. It seems unlikely that all these announcements are a coincidence and the IoT land grab is definitely gathering intensity.

Cloudwatt, France, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Numergy, Orange

Orange confirms Cloudwatt acquisition

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange confirmed this week that the company has finalised an agreement to acquire all remaining shares of Cloudwatt, the cloud services provider it set up with the French government.

In January the company confirmed it had entered into discussions to buy the firm, in which Orange had the largest stake; Thales owned 22 per cent and Caisse des Dépôts 33 per cent of Cloudwatt.

“By acquiring Cloudwatt, Orange will strengthen its enterprise cloud services offering – a major focus of its “Essentials2020″ strategic plan,” Orange said in a statement.

“The technologies and services offered by Cloudwatt complement Orange’s own portfolio and represent an opportunity to accelerate the deployment of a sovereign public cloud both in France and in Europe.”

Through Caisse des Dépôts, the French state paid €75m for its share of Cloudwatt and spent another €75m to help set up Numergy (co-founded by SFR and Bull) through the French government’s ‘Project Andromeda’ in a bid to provide locally-hosted competition to US-based cloud service providers.

Reports earlier this year suggested a potential merger between Numergy and Cloudwatt was in the works in late 2014, however, now that Atos owns Bull and Numericable owns SFR, it’s thought a potential deal would have been too awkward for shareholders to accept.

The acquisition will see Orange integrate all of Cloudwatt’s employee into its operations (likely the company’s Business Services division).

Cloud gaming, EMEA, IPTV, Orange, Partnerships, Video game

G-cluster Global, Orange Group Strike Cloud Gaming Partnership

Beginning October 11, Orange broadband customers will experience a seamless and easy-to-access top quality video gaming experience directly on their TV.

The Orange cloud gaming service powered by G-cluster offers to Orange customers a gaming solution free of any old generation hardware concerns and allows them to easily access and play a wide catalogue of video games directly on TV.

With a catalogue of about 100 video games at launch, the Orange cloud gaming service provides valuable gaming content for the whole family! This innovative gaming solution provides many benefits for the end user: simplicity of access and use, attractive prices, a diversified and wide catalogue of games.

G-cluster has been rendering cloud gaming service since 2010. The launch of the Orange cloud gaming service reinforces G-cluster’s position as the leading cloud gaming platform in Europe.

As with video on demand, the end user can access games directly and quickly without the need to download content or purchase any new physical devices. To play, just use the remote controller or a gamepad (any USB gamepad or the one recommended by Orange). The end user can play alone, with other players in the same room or remotely with other Orange TV customers who have subscribed.

Orange offers a new model of usage for interactive content to its new TV users with an attractive price point. End users will be able to enjoy a diversified catalogue of games thanks to unlimited and no commitment monthly subscription packs or with 24h, 48h or 1 week rental offers. A free try-before-you-buy offer is available for all the games in the catalogue.

– Discovery pass: 5€/month for unlimited access to 50 top casual games

– Premium pass: 10€/month for access to premium console games on top of the entire catalogue of casual games

– Rentals: 24h, 48h or weekly rentals of games at affordable prices

Orange and G-cluster have partnered with top leading casual and premium publishers such as Disney, Ubisoft, Playrix, MumboJumbo and Alawar to provide a fun and entertaining experience to all the household members.

The Orange games on demand service will offer games for anyone in the family: action and air fighting games like H.A.W.X® 2 from Ubisoft and kids’ games like Toy Story 3 from Disney. Pixar.

Erik Piehl, president of G-cluster Global says, “G-cluster is very happy to provide its white-label cloud gaming service to Orange, the largest IPTV provider in Europe. This further expands G-cluster’s lead as the largest scale TV cloud gaming provider.”

Jean-François Rodriguez, VP Games and social media at Orange says, “Orange and G-Cluster have built a strong partnership to offer a new gaming experience by leveraging on Orange high speed broadband network and G-Cluster cloud gaming technology. After Video on Demand, streaming music, Orange customers will now enjoy games on demand service.”