Orange looks set to use Cisco, EMC, VMware in cloud

IDG News Service - Orange Business Services appears poised to become a cloud service provider using pre-integrated "VBlocks" from Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware.

Orange will join those companies for an audio news conference on Monday morning, according to a media advisory released Friday. Cisco, EMC and VMware are partners in the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, which was formed in November 2009. The group was formed to combine networking, storage, computing and virtualization components in prepackaged "VBlocks" for constructing data centers. They also formed a joint venture, called Acadia, to help customers and system integrators build VBlocks.

Orange Business Services, a division of the multinational carrier Orange, already sells a variety of services to enterprises worldwide. Depending on the country, those include voice, video, unified communications, managed services, project management and security. Last month, Ovum analyst Peter Hall said Orange Business Services, AT&T and BT were in position to compete in cloud computing with the major cloud players from the IT industry. He predicted that large global and regional carriers would become major providers of services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Hall will participate in the audio conference on Monday.

Other participants will include Orange Business Services CEO Vivek Badrinath, Cisco Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd, EMC cloud services chief Howard Elias and Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of worldwide field operations at VMware, according to a registration page for the event.

Just last week, the VCE partners announced that Singapore carrier SingTel would use their products to offer hosted computing services to enterprise customers before the end of this year. The group said SingTel was its first Asian customer.

As virtualization brings computing, storage and networks together into one pool of IT resources, which can be delivered as a computing "cloud," enterprise IT vendors have been jockeying to create product lineups that span all those categories. Going up against the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle, the Virtual Computing Environment group is attempting to tackle the market through partnership.