Orange goes global with unified communications

Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) is a hot topic these days. Businesses of all sizes are looking for ways to cut their communications costs while simultaneously improving digital collaboration, increasing the effectiveness of distributed workforces and supporting the burgeoning bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, culture. (Larger firms that want to expand their global footprint are also eyeing foreign opportunities.) Solving all these problems at once seems like a daunting task, but a new solution from Orange Business Services is up to the challenge.

Built on Cisco’s HSC platform, Business Together as a Service features three particularly interesting innovations:

• it’s a global service that functions the same in any location around the world and flexes with demand as needed;
• unlike currently available collaboration platforms, it’s priced the same around the world and supports billing in virtually any currency;
• the admin and user portals are translated into 29 languages.

Business Together as a Service has already been introduced in Europe, with more than 40 companies signing up, and Dan daCosta, head of telephony services marketing for Orange Business Services, told Pipeline that the company just signed its first customer in the North America/South America region, a large client with more than 200,000 end users.

“How do you flatten the cost globally?” he said. “Provide it from the cloud. All we have to do is provide connectivity.” DaCosta went on to say that Orange Business Services is seeing an increase in the number of customers who “specify as-a-service as a delivery model in their requests for pricing (RFPs)."

A UC&C solution that’s priced the same in any country and can flex with demand and support mobile clients in BYOD environments is certainly an attractive option for businesses, which, from the perspective of IT management, won’t have to make an investment in Cisco gear, not to mention employees to manage the solution. In addition, provisioning mobile devices is as simple as clicking on a link to install the mobile client.

The level of agility afforded to businesses that utilize such a solution is significant (Pipeline recently highlighted the importance of localization, especially in emerging markets), making Business Together as a Service a serious contender in the global UC&C market.

Is Amazon moving into your living room?

How can Amazon get a greater slice of the video pie, manage quality of service (QoS) with better visibility and position itself more effectively in the connected-home service market? A set-top box, that’s how, and rumors are circulating that the world’s leading internet-based retailer is busy developing such a solution.

According to both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, Amazon is expanding its video services and will begin selling its own over-the-top (OTT) device sometime this year to compete with set-top boxes from Apple, Google and Roku as well as gaming consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Analysts point to Amazon’s deep content library and established one-click billing relationship with millions of users as reasons why its plan might have legs.

Anonymous sources claim that Lab126, one of Amazon’s research-and-development groups, is working on the set-top box in Cupertino, California. The project is being spearheaded by Malachy Moynihan, a former Cisco executive.