Orange Business Services (Orange) provides a wide range of technology solutions to global multi-national corporations (MNC) including telephony, mobility, CRM, and network management.
The Service Management group is one part of Orange and is responsible for monitoring these solutions globally. Orange has 30,000 employees in 166 countries and territories across the world.
Orange Service Management solution is delivered via their Customized Infrastructure Care (CIC) solution. The solution remotely monitors every component of a customers' communication infrastructure, both hardware and software, utilizing a management web portal so both Orange and the customer can see what is happening at any point in time and take corrective actions as required.
In April 2010, Service Management was looking to launch a new version of the CIC solution to meet the needs of complex customers. For Orange Business Services, the greatest challenges were:
"We are a large company and needed to be more flexible in how we serve our customers. Since we are evolving how we deliver offerings, we wanted to be able to quickly provide new customer solutions and options based on what we hear in Customer Council meetings."
Orange explored several infrastructure options, including building CIC 2.0 through traditional hosting. Mr. Cardona explained that "in the end, speed and flexibility were the reasons we decided to partner with GoGrid. Things are usually faster in our partner's ecosystem than doing it internally. We had some key milestone dates we needed to meet, and we could only meet them by using a cloud solution." By using Orange innovative Time to Market (TTM) project methodology in conjunction with GoGrid's ability to delivery quickly, the entire project, from inception to completion was three months.
By exploring what the cloud infrastructure market had to offer, Orange discovered that with a hosted private cloud - built to the requirements of the CIC solution - they could reduce the overall total cost of ownership, reduce time to market and innovate new solutions for customers. Building a traditional hosting infrastructure internally for the CIC solution would not allow Orange to focus on customer solutions and remain a force in their marketplace.
There were several features of the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud, both functional and operational, that Orange cited as key contributors to the success of the CIC 2.0 launch:
The Orange solution capitalizes on the built-in security provided by the layer-2 VLANs dedicated to each GoGrid account, along with GoGrid's flexibility and ability to integrate custom infrastructure into GoGrid data centers.
Orange Business Services and GoGrid evaluated their unique strengths and working together, combined the power of Orange global Business VPN network and GoGrid's Hosted Private Cloud to create the backbone of the CIC solution. Orange own security and network optimization infrastructure is hosted directly within GoGrid's data centers, and is tightly integrated into the GoGrid cloud via custom, GoGrid-managed network infrastructure. This allows Orange to capitalize on their expertise in network security by entirely managing the network traffic to, from, and within each GoGrid account dedicated to a given Orange customer.
Additionally, Orange is able to take advantage of GoGrid Server Images (GSIs) to save their application stack across all of their GoGrid accounts, and quickly deploy new services with these pre-built images, dramatically shortening their provisioning time. It takes minutes for them to turn up a pre-installed suite of servers to perform network monitoring for a new customer, versus the weeks or months needed for alternative solutions.
"Armed with the GoGrid console, we spin up new servers when we are launching services for a customer. We have pre-defined images in our cloud storage that have the application stack pre-configured." CIC customers can monitor and scale their CIC services on-demand which was previously not possible.
Reduced costs of ownership
"We've saved money in bringing this to market, both in terms of development costs and hardware. The actual results have exceeded our initial business case. The dollars and manpower saved have been huge."
Reduced provisioning time from two months to two weeks
"Our customers were consistently saying that we needed to decrease the time to provision our services. We were typically allowing 60 days for deployment. Three or four weeks of that were spent waiting for hardware to be delivered and installed. Now, we have cut the time in half, and from a technology perspective we could get it down to less than two weeks."
Improved customer solutions
"By using GoGrid and the Orange innovative TTM process, we were able to spend more time on developing value-add features and services for our customers and less time on building out infrastructure. This has resulted in a better solution for our customers."
Increased sales
"Something we always wanted to be able to do was have the sales team offer a 'try and buy' option. Using GoGrid, Orange sales team can now have the ability to literally bring up a predefined, templated prototype and give the customer access during a sales meeting."
