Category Archives: Orange Business Services

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Orange Business Services, Public Cloud

Orange Business Services beefs up cloud gateway

GatewayOrange Business Services has integrated its Enterprise Application Management (EAM) Riverbed offering into its Business VPN Galerie portfolio, reports Telecoms.com.

The EAM offering is a fully-managed service from Orange Business Services targeted on delivering application acceleration and WAN optimization to boost user experience. The product aims to tackle a number of different challenges for customers including insufficient WAN bandwidth, as well as insufficient transport and application protocols in high-latency environments.

The offering uses Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to deliver application acceleration and WAN optimization, which uses various optimization techniques including data, transport, application and management streamlining. The data streamlining techniques are claimed to reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65% to 98% for TCP-based applications.

“Customers need to boost end-user application experience with faster response times to increase productivity at a global scale, enable business-critical migration projects and improve the corporate image,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, VP of the connectivity business at Orange Business Services. “By integrating Riverbed’s best-of-breed technology in our secure and fully-managed solution we can deliver this promise.”

The Business VPN Galerie, which Orange claims was the world’s first cloud-ready network, offers customers a range of cloud-based applications and services from their own private network provided by Orange Business Services or its partners. The portfolio currently has 1,600 customers, as well as more than 20 cloud partners including Orange Cloud for Business, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Express Route, Salesforce and AWS.

Elsewhere in the Orange business, the team have opened a new Eco campus based in Chatillon on the outskirts of Paris, which will be devoted completely to research and innovation.

“Innovation, has always been one of the Group’s fundamentals, and must be the expression of Orange’s mission: transforming technology into progress each day and serving people through innovation,” said Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange. “To put the human context in the centre of our thinking, it is a choice we accept and that characterises us, this is a philosophy that now has a name: ‘Human Inside’. ‘Human Inside’ is both a slogan and a catchword, that gives meaning and which highlights all our action.”

Akamai, cloud applications. VPN, News & Analysis, Orange Business Services, Software as a service

Orange Business Services and Akamai offer 10x faster cloud access

Cloud computingOrange Business Services (OBS) and content delivery specialist Akamai claim they have worked out a way to give enterprise clients up to 10 times faster access to business critical cloud applications.

The new Business VPN Internet Accelerate service, available from OBS, was created using Akamai’s Cloud Networking technology. It optimizes software as a service (SaaS) access so that users don’t have to wait for cloud-based applications, dashboards and documents to open and save.

This, says OBS, will make their customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence activities more potent and productive. The performance improvement is made by tweaking the transport mechanism across the OBS virtual private networks that extend, via an IPSec tunnel, to branch offices in enterprises.

OBS said it improves the cloud user experience through five customer support centres and eight CyberSecurity Operations Centres where it analyses network traffic, constantly configures service levels and monitors security. The Orange business-grade Internet service relies on the global Akamai Intelligent Platform, a content delivery accelerator which has 200,000 servers in 110 countries to localize material. It uses Orange’s global private network of mobile, satellite and wireline access links.

Orange is currently running pilots of Business VPN Internet Accelerate with a number of enterprises. The service is scheduled to be globally available in early 2016.

Getting networks fit for a cloud future with business grade connectivity is vital, said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, OBS’s VP of Connectivity Solutions. “Business VPN Internet Accelerate allows enterprises to embrace global hybrid networks and the Internet,” said Biaggi.

The claim for ten times faster access speeds was based on the results of an Orange Proof-of-Concept between Paris and Singapore. The vendor did not disclose what system was used as a benchmark on which the ten-fold improvement was made.

Information technology management, Internet Technology, Orange Business Services, Telepresence, Video, Videoconferencing

Orange Launches Cloud-based Telepresence Service

Orange Business Services is enhancing its video services portfolio with Telepresence Pass, a new cloud-based offer that delivers a financially attractive, flexible and scalable solution for its enterprise customers.

Telepresence Pass is an easy-to-adopt and future-proof solution that allows companies to benefit from:

  • a Telepresence infrastructure in the cloud
  • a fully managed service with end-to-end quality guarantees
  • a monthly subscription fee

Telepresence Pass is a simple way for enterprises to harness the benefits of immersive videoconferencing across their companies and with their business ecosystems. Because Telepresence Pass is available as a service, customers do not need significant investments in equipment or in the management of their solution.

“Our ambition is to make video available to enterprises wherever they are, with no limitations,” said Vivek Badrinath, CEO, Orange Business Services. “The key is to offer customers many video collaboration options so that they can choose the solution that best suits their business needs.”

Telepresence Pass joins a wide-ranging portfolio of video services offered by Orange Business Services and is backed by a supportive network environment, extensive conferencing experience, and an overall strategy that enables enterprises to get the most out of their video investments.

“Of all applications, video is probably the most unforgiving,” said Nicolas Roy, head of Network Solutions Business Unit, Orange Business Services. “The Group continues to invest approximately €750 million per year for international network backbone and related IT infrastructure to ensure the coverage, bandwidth and quality required for an excellent video experience.”