By: Jesse Cryderman

Cloud report

Activity in the cloud continues to heat up, especially in areas that haven’t seen significant development to date. Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, for instance, are on track to be the next big thing, according to Gartner Research. Cisco had a busy month, first buying Cloupia to better manage data centers, then scooping up cloud networking firm Meraki for a cool $1.2 billion. It’s all part of Cisco’s strategy to target mid-market cloud opportunities, which will leverage PaaS.

While some folks in the States continue to debate the merits of the Amazon cloud, Orange Digital in Europe chose to offload its cloud operations to Amazon. Along with countless new digital products, Orange Digital manages digital services for the UK 4G brand EE.

“Our infrastructure was expensive to run and time-consuming to maintain,” said Neil Jennings, lead enterprise architect for Orange Digital. “Our traffic profile is variable in nature, which resulted in an oversized infrastructure 90 percent of the time. In addition, we had many EE micro-sites and applications that needed rapid and temporary hosting.” 

Billions and billions served

What do you get when you combine assets from Telcordia and ConceptWave with Ericsson? A billing outfit that reaches two billion customers, that’s what. This represents a 31 percent market share of global subscriptions for Ericsson, and includes subscriptions of Ericsson’s charging systems, BSCS, CBiO (Charging and Billing in One), and charging solutions from the acquired Telcordia. The solutions comprise a mix of converged, prepaid and postpaid deployments around the world.

Battling OTT

A global wireless service provider has finally stepped in the ring to do battle directly with over-the-top (OTT) competitors. France Telecom, under the brand Orange, has released a new app for iOS in 90 countries that goes head to head with OTT services like Skype and Whatsapp, offering HD voice, messaging, personalization, and social integration services over any cellular or Wi-Fi network. The free app, called Libon, will also incorporate Rich Communication Services (RCS) next year.

In addition to the free version of Libon, Orange offers a premium version. This in-app subscription service provides unlimited customized greetings, full-length transcription of all voicemail messages, unlimited storage, and email copies of all voicemails. In addition, Libon offers its premium users a full hour of international calling every month to landlines or mobile numbers in 31 countries, allowing users to operate or experiment with Libon even with friends or family who aren’t yet subscribers.