Orange cloud service brightens unified communications offerings

Orange Business Services has announced a cloud-based unified communications service called Business Together. Bringing the cloud model to business collaboration services gives businesses a more cost-effective way of accessing and using unified communications tools.

The Orange service uses Cisco Systems' Hosted Collaboration Solution and builds on a previous announcement the France Telecom unit made about partnering with air transport industry IT player SITA on a dedicated cloud computing infrastructure. That deal will give Orange six cloud-ready data centers on five continents secured with premium levels of security required by global enterprises, the company said.

The services, which will be available in Europe this year, and other regions next year, supports a broad range of applications, including telephony, unified messaging, IM with presence, conferencing (audio, Web and video), support for mobile devices and a contact center option. Businesses can use a portal to 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 when opening new offices or adding employees through an acquisition or merger.

For more:
- see this Orange release

Related articles:
Unified communications spending is expected to grow faster than overall IT spending
Orange is among the incumbent carriers dominating the EMEA market