More France IP Communications Stories

Orange Business Services (News - Alert), the France Telecom-Orange branch dedicated to B2B services and a leading global integrator of communications solutions for multinational corporations, has launched Business Together as a Service.

Business Together as a Service is a unified communication solution designed to enable an innovative way of working and collaborating.

Officials with Orange Business Services said that the service allows Unified Communications (News - Alert) solutions to be offered via the cloud, using an "as a service" model that allows enterprises to access communication and collaboration tools quickly and cost-effectively, any time, anywhere, on any device.

According to company officials, Business Together as a Service, which is based on the Cisco (News - Alert) Hosted Collaboration Solution, is already available in France where it is being delivered to six customers already, among which Xerox General Services and Orange Labs. It will be available in Europe later in 2011 and in all other regions in 2012.

"Offering Business Together as a Service adds the flexibility and cost efficiency benefits of cloud computing to our existing Business Together offer," said Paul Molinier, vice president, unified communications & collaboration, Orange Business Services, in a statement.

Molinier said that employees need productivity tools that make it easier and faster for them to get things done. Business Together combines Orange Business Services' expertise with the powerful technologies of the partners to offer a wide range of global collaborative services.

He said that Business Together as a Service helps employees collaborate together more efficiently using a complete suite of best-in-class and on-demand tools.

"Orange Business Services and Cisco are helping IT departments access collaboration and unified communications applications based on the deployment model of their choice: in the cloud, on premise or both. Companies now have flexibility and choice in how they deploy these advanced and business-critical technologies to their end users," said Eric Schoch, senior director for the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution.

TMCnet recently reported that Air transport industry IT specialist SITA and Orange Business Services have agreed to jointly build a global, managed cloud computing infrastructure.

Once completed, both the companies are expected to use the infrastructure to deliver cloud services portfolio to their markets with added global reach, reliability and minimum latency.