Alliance Wields Private Cloud Power
Just in case you missed it, Cisco, VMware and EMC have banded together with telecom giant Orange Business Services to form The Flexible 4 Business alliance, whose aim is to encourage enterprise migration to the cloud via private cloud technologies. The alliance is a logical extension of the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition, which was formed by Cisco, VMware and EMC a year ago to drive the transition to private cloud infrastructures via greater IT infrastructure flexibility and lower IT, energy and real estate costs offered by ubiquitous data center virtualization.
Orange Business Services is the telecommunications arm of France Telecom Group, and is primarily focused on providing a wide range of telecom services to enterprises. It is a very large managed services provider of everything from MPLS networking to WAN services, managed security and mobility services. Orange says it provides its services in over 220 countries and territories, and has staff in 166 countries.
Just to put those numbers in perspective, About.com says there are 195 countries in the world, while Yahoo! Answers claims there are 61 territories plus six more that are disputed.
Orange will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions offered by the alliance. They are private cloud and backup services, and security and unified communications services.
Cisco is contributing its unified communications and security capabilities to the group, while VMware is providing vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, and VMware Cloud Director. For its part, EMC is offering its wide-ranging data deduplication and storage capabilities, which are of course compatible with the products of VMware, in which it has a controlling interest.
Question: How long Cisco will continue rubbing shoulders with VMware before it tries to buy out the virtualization numero uno?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/28/2010 at 12:48 PM