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French incumbent to open new data centre in Amsterdam next month
Orange Business Services (OBS) has added support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its portfolio as part of its ambitious plan to become a leading multi-cloud services provider.
The French incumbent said this week it has trained 100 staff worldwide to help corporate clients manage their most critical applications on AWS.
Orange’s cloud strategy doesn’t hinge entirely on Amazon though. Citing statistics from Rightscale, the telco noted that the average enterprise uses five different cloud providers, 81% of which operate in a multicloud environment.
As such, OBS has opted to be agnostic in its choice of cloud technologies, and to this end has already partnered with AWS rival, Microsoft Azure.
"The storage and calculation capacities offered by cloud computing and the opportunities for transformation and acceleration it offers businesses makes it key to our ambition and growth," said Helmut Reisinger, chief executive of OBS, in a statement on Tuesday.
OBS aims to generate more than 50% of its cloud revenues overseas by 2022. With that in mind, OBS on Tuesday also revealed that it plans to open a new data centre in Amsterdam in October. It comes after the opening of another OBS data centre in Atlanta in the U.S. last May.
OBS is also on a cloud-related hiring spree. It currently employs 2,200 cloud experts, and is in the process of recruiting a further 300 this year.
"Data has become the fourth production factor in the economy," Reisinger said. "Our goal is to enhance on our carrier-grade integrator expertise to support businesses throughout the entire data cycle from collection, to protection, analysis and sharing."
