Orange Business Services has the lofty ambition of becoming a global player for multicloud services, and in order to reach that goal it announced Tuesday that it was supporting and managing its customers on Amazon Web Services' cloud platform.
Orange Business Services already has a similar deal in place with Microsoft Azure as it presses forward on its growth strategy for the cloud computing market.
When it comes to cloud services, businesses want options. According to a study by Rightscale that Orange cited, enterprises today are relying on an average of five different cloud providers, of which 81% operate in multicloud environments.
In order to help its customers manage their diverse cloud environments, Orange Business Services is taking an agnostic approach in its choice of cloud technologies, which allows it to serve as a middleman integrator that can orchestrate and use various applications across hybrid, public and private cloud environments.
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Orange Business Services has set a goal of generating more than 50% of its cloud revenues outside of its home country of France while notching a 25% growth rate by 2022.
Orange Business Services increased its cloud revenues by 18% in first half of this year. It also boosted its cloud fortunes last month with a deal to buy Basefarm, which is a cloud-based infrastructure and critical services provider with 11 data centers across four countries in Europe. Basefarm generated 100 million Euros of revenue last year.
On the personnel side, Orange Business Services currently has 2,200 cloud experts with plans of hiring an additional 300 globally in 2018.
Working with Huawei Technologies, Orange Business Services will open the doors on a new data center in Amsterdam next month, after opening another data center in Atlanta in May.
Other telcos are also teaming up with the major cloud companies. CenturyLink has agreements with Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud and VMware Cloud while Verizon announced earlier this year that it had picked AWS as its preferred public cloud provider. Last year, AT&T announced it had expanded its business cloud network partnership with AWS.