SITA and Orange Business Services Partner for a Global Cloud

SITA, which bills itself as the air transport industry IT specialist, and Orange Business Services, the communications service provider arm of France Telecom-Orange, have announced a partnership to launch a global managed cloud infrastructure. Both SITA and Orange will use that infrastructure to deliver their portfolio of cloud service offerings to clients with a greatly expanded international reach.

To make this happen, SITA and Orange will jointly build “seamlessly interconnected Tier III+ and Tier IV data centers” in Atlanta, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney. They’ll be joined together by Orange’s MPLS network and secured with redundant connections and failover sites, among other security precautions, according to the press release.

Between the two providers, customers will be able to take advantage of a wide range of “-aaS” offerings, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) – sometimes better known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

When the first three data centers (Atlanta, Frankfurt and Singapore) go live in the target Q1 2012 timeframe, Orange and SITA will begin offering services in the relevant regions, but will manage their own customer billing relationships. All six are anticipated to be online by Q3 2012.

Orange Business Services has been especially vocal about its commitment to taking the cloud global. We’ll be watching to see how this plays out in the marketplace, so stay tuned to TalkinCloud.

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