Following the acquisition of Basefarm in August and increase of its cloud revenues by 18% in the 1st half of 2018, Orange Business Services is pressing ahead with its growth strategy for the cloud computing market. Its target is to become a global leader in multi-cloud services.
On average, enterprises rely on five different cloud providers, 81% of which operate in a multi-cloud environment. To support these companies manage this diversity, Orange Business Services has chosen to be agnostic in its choice of cloud technologies. This positions Orange as an integrator that can orchestrate and leverage various applications, critical or not, in an end-to-end, multi-cloud environment, be it public or private cloud.
Orange Business Services has set up, beyond its own infrastructure, a major alliance strategy with other leaders in the industry. After partnering with Microsoft Azure, Orange Business Services is announcing that it can support its clients and manage their most critical applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with 100 experts trained on these technologies in France and globally.
With a total of 2,200 cloud experts, Orange Business Services is continuing to invest in its own cloud capabilities and plans to hire 300 employees in 2018 worldwide.
To achieve its goal of generating more than 50% of its cloud revenues overseas by 2022 and being able to support its customers across all geographic regions with a high standard of service and availability, Orange Business Services has decided to forge key alliances, notably with Huawei. In this context, it will be opening a new data center in Amsterdam in October, following the latest opening of one in Atlanta last May. Basefarm's activities, which generated 100 million euros of revenues in 2017, are also driving Orange Business Services’ strong growth ambitions outside France.
Innovation at the core of growth
Orange Business Services places innovation at the heart of its cloud strategy and integrates in its solutions the latest technological advances, such as hyper convergence, Artificial Intelligence or Platforms as a Service (PaaS). The goal is to enable businesses to meet their requirements in terms of agility and competitiveness.
Orange Business Services has also implemented a structured co-innovation approach with its customers, which has inspired, for example, to develop a new monitoring tool for strategic applications that is unique in the market because it can be accessed on mobile devices.
A Cloud Starter offering for start-ups was also launched this year. Orange Business Services’ ambition is to support them by offering cloud services to develop their solutions. RendR, which allows you to visit lost historical heritage sites, has reduced its computer-generated imagery calculation time by 98% thanks to this offering.
“Data has become the fourth production factor in the economy. Our goal is to enhance on our carrier-grade integrator expertise to support businesses throughout the entire data cycle from collection, to protection, analysis and sharing. The storage and calculation capacities offered by cloud computing and the opportunities for transformation and acceleration it offers businesses makes it key to our ambition and growth,” said Helmut Reisinger, Chief Executive Officer, Orange Business Services.
