Orange Business Services highlights strategic focus on Middle East region at conference in Oman
Orange Business Services, the B2B arm of France Telecom-Orange and one of the largest ICT employers in the Middle East, has identified the Middle East as a strategic region for the next five years. The company is focusing on the opportunities presented by smart cities, cloud computing and the development of the enterprise services market.
This strategy was presented during the annual Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (EEMEA) regional meeting held in Muscat. Customers and partners joined more than 200 senior Orange Business Services staff representing 80 countries.
Philippe Koebel, Senior Vice President and Head of Emerging Markets for Orange Business Services, said: Orange Business Services has all of the necessary needed assets in the region to contribute to our strong business ambition in the emerging markets of generating 1 billion euros in revenue by 2015. We offer a full range of solutions from various local network access options through Business VPN up to telepresence, unified communications and fully connected smart cities. With 2,000 regional staff, five regional offices, a major service center, and two Orange labs, Orange Business Services is well equipped to meet the needs of our customers whether simple or complex.â€
Orange Business Services is a smart city pioneer, delivering telecommunications infrastructure solutions to cities that provide ubiquitous IP-based infrastructure and connectivity, backed by innovative related ICT services, including voice solutions, business and on-demand connectivity, public Wi-Fi and state-of-the-art security.
2010 proved to be a successful year for Orange Business Services in the region with 10 major new clients added and a range of high profile smart city project wins. Orange Business Services supports more than 500 multinational customers in EEMEA, including: BHP Billiton, Ecobank, Lafarge, MAF Carrefour, Omantel, South African Breweries, and United Arab Shipping Company (UASC).
To address the cloud computing demand, Orange Business Services appointed its first Middle East & Africa Regional Cloud Director in August 2010 and, along with Cisco, EMC and VMware, announced Flexible 4 Business to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises.
Orange Business Services inks partnership deal with Praxis (Mexico)
Orange Business Services – Trading Solutions has signed a partnership deal with Praxis, a Mexican company providing consultancy integration and development of Trading Solutions’ products and services in Mexico.
The deal aims to drive new customer implementations of Trading Solutions’ products in Mexico City where Praxis is headquartered.
Praxis will also provide customers with locally-based support contacts if they require assistance. Praxis will now extend this service to deliver Trading Solutions’ products through its offices in the Mexican city of Monterrey.
Cellular M2M Connections Will Show stable increase to beat 297 Million in 2015
Cellular M2M (machine-to-machine) connections continue to show stable growth, and are anticipated to beat 297 million in 2015.
As per the latest update of ABI Research’s forecasts, the 2009 forecast of about 225 million connections by 2014 has also been raised to 232.5 million.
Within this global representation, however, are many regional differences. Europe continues to account for the largest regional share with 110 million connections in 2015; North America will rank second with 79 million and the Asia-Pacific region third with almost 66 million.
According to ABI Research practice director Sam Lucero, the major world regions show different drivers for cellular M2M markets. The European market is the most diversified and has the most mature deployments. In North America the focus has traditionally been more on telematics, although M2M is now growing strongly in other areas including smart energy. Both telematics and energy are providing impetus in Asia-Pac, but the markets are less mature, outside of key countries such as Japan.
The major operators providing M2M in Asia are NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Korea Telecom, and China Mobile, which recently announced that it is serving five million M2M connections. In Europe, important providers include Telefonica in Spain, Telenor (Scandinavia), Orange Business Services (part of France Telecom), and Vodafone.
The four major cellular operators in North America, Verizon Wireless (which operates GM’s OnStar service), AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are all offering M2M, in addition to alternative providers such as Kore Telematics and Numerex.
Some business model and operational differences exist, too: European providers tend not only to set up different M2M business units, but to supply those units with their own M2M-specific infrastructure. And they’re more oriented towards providing value-added services in addition to basic M2M connectivity. North American operator M2M business units, in contrast, tend to use the operators’ main networks for M2M.
Wireless Operators: Potential equipped to manage cloud computing, as the market warms
If reports are to be believed, the big-brand global telcos are positioning themselves to be tough players in the cloud computing market as corporate attitudes to cloud warm.
According to researchers Ovum, AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business could compete with established players from the IT industry in the cloud computing arena.
The telcos have a long heritage in providing managed end to end networks, data center services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services.
Some observers have considered the telcos might not fare so well in some parts of the cloud computing ecosystem, mostly in parts of the ecosystem requiring more application expertise. Telcos are well familiarized to organizing mission-critical data centers. That, in essence, is what modern switching and routing facilities are.
Telcos are bound to succeed here because they already have many of the key skills on tap the market. They have a long heritage in the managed data centre and hosting businesses and when you put this together with their networking and security expertise it starts to look like a strong package.
The key for the telcos is the ability to offer end-to-end management of the network. This attracts mostly to large corporate and big companies with mission-critical applications.
Reimbursing a long-term path to offer improved service for Cloud connections along with standard Internet access was most probably one of the ideas in the back of the collective mind of Verizon when it stroked out its ‘joint statement’ with Google on Internet neutrality.
Certainly, the ability to offer something in between an enthusiastic but expensive end-to-end network, and a cost-effective but much cheaper Internet access offer would clearly be another big plus for carriers eyeing up the corporate cloud market and wanting – in the US at least – to make sure they didn’t run into regulatory problems through offering enhanced quality of service.
