Orange Business Services launches Business Together as a Service

PARIS, FRANCE: Orange Business Services is introducing Business Together as a Service, a unified communication solution designed to enable an innovative way of working and collaborating. Business Together as a Service allows Unified Communications solutions to be offered via the cloud, using an “as a service” model that allows enterprises to quickly and cost-effectively access communication and collaboration tools any time, anywhere, on any device.

Business Together as a Service will benefit from the upcoming dedicated cloud computing infrastructure recently announced with partner SITA. This infrastructure will provide an even higher level of network reach with six cloud-ready data centers on five continents secured with premium levels of security required by global enterprises.

Based on the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Business Together as a Service 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.

Components and benefits of Business Together as a Service
Applications include: telephony, unified messaging, IM with presence, conferencing (audio, Web and video), support for mobile devices and a contact center option. Through an easy-to-use portal, companies can select from five pre-set profiles to match different employee group needs and change the number of end user accounts up or down quickly and easily.

This level of agility and flexibility allows companies to quickly open new offices, integrate a newly-acquired company or react to changing business needs. Additionally, customers pay as they go, only pay for the applications their employees use, and they do not have to expend Capex or internal resources.

Why Orange?
With more than 2.7 million business clients, 3,700 multinational clients, and 325,000 IP VPN access points in 177 countries, Orange Business Services provides fully managed, global unified communications services with end-to-end service level agreements and customer support.

Orange’s extensive Field Services in 166 countries supports customers transitioning to cloud-based services. With the Cisco Managed Services Master certification worldwide, Orange Business Services provides ITIL® standards-based service management for operational best practice and global ISO certification to ensure high service availability. Orange enables customers to access Business Together as a Service through IP VPN in a highly secure fashion, ensuring that each customer's usage is private.

“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. ”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 our partners to offer a wide range of global collaborative services. Business Together as a Service helps employees collaborate together more efficiently using a complete suite of best-in-class and on-demand tools.”

Eric Schoch, senior director for the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, said: “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.”

Value of Cisco
Orange Business Services is one of Cisco’s leading service provider customers in Europe and one of the two global service providers that qualified for early field trials of Cisco’s HCS technologies. Orange Business Services and Cisco share a complementary vision to provide enterprises with a rich set of collaboration tools together with ubiquitous network access from the cloud.

Both companies aim to provide cost-effective and standards-based unified communications solutions based on Orange’s experience delivering and supporting end-to-end Internet Protocol telephony and collaboration solutions.