Orange Business Services (OBS), the business-to-business (B2B) subsidiary of France Telecom Group is poised to shift from phase one to phase two of its Orange Cloud computing strategy.
Research firm Ovum also said although phase one (2008-2011) was not high-achieving in terms of revenue, it has enabled OBS to build the capabilities and resources needed for the next phase.
Phase 2 starts in 2012 with the ambition to generate €500 million ($XX) by 2015 from a broader international portfolio of cloud services delivered from a brand new network of data centers.
In an upcoming Ovum report, Orange Cloud: the next phase, Ovum outlines why phase two is likely to take longer to develop than anticipated. OBS may have pulled itself together around its cloud offering, but it is still very early days for this offering.
OBS needed to expand its international footprint. France Telecom Group draws the majority of its revenues from its domestic operations, which exposes it to higher risk and uncertainty in comparison with other European operators such as Telefónica and Vodafone.
As a result, the organization intends to double revenue from emerging markets by 2015. Most of OBS’s cloud services are currently only available from French data centers (DCs), but this is about to change. OBS has started to roll out a network of seven DCs interconnected across five continents by its MPLS network.
These infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms will enable OBS to shift from a rather bespoke array of cloud (and IT) services to a much more standardized, industrialized set of services to cut costs and boost consistency. It will also help OBS to offer hybrid cloud services that span virtual private and private cloud platforms.