Business Technology Roundtable

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business -- to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables. Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners. Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing man...

Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses and half on operating expenses. Further, an estimated 70 percent or more of those costs are expended to maintain existing infrastructures, leaving 30 percent or less for new technology initiatives and applications that can provide breakthrough differentiation for businesses. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion, or 20 percent of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015. Cisco and EMC , together with VMware , have introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. Virtual Computing Environment Coalition Charter The coalition has been created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT inf...

Joe Panettieri did a great job describing the IT management and business implications of the growing dispersion of today's workforce in his post "Managed Services: Safe at Home" . This trend is not only creating new challenges that are driving greater corporate interests in managed services, it is also attracting a broadening array of managed service providers (MSPs) to satisfy businesses' escalating needs. The office supply retailers are increasingly nibbling around the edges of the IT services market. The most obvious example is Best Buy's Geek Squad which has primarily served the consumer needs of the residential market, but is also responding to the needs of the small office/home office (SOHO) market which Joe described in his post. The latest example of this trend is the recent news that Staples is going to deliver a portfolio of IT services to small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). These services are going to center around the acquisition Staples made in la...