On the International Front: FT/Orange, Global Crossing, and Pacnet

In international networking, let’s quickly look at few recent news items:

France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings) and its Orange Business subsidiary had a few announcements recently.  Yesterday, the latter announced a sweeping alliance with Cisco, EMC and VMware, called Flexible 4 Business.  The idea is to bring cloud computing to large enterprises, which is becoming a familiar theme.  All the big players are jockeying for position ahead of the game.  Late last week France Telecom also announced plans to add new undersea fiber to its Lower Indian Ocean Network cable system.  The project is dubbed LION2 and  will extend from Madagascar to Kenya and to the island of Mayotte.

glbc debuted new desktop and mobile collaboration applications under the moniker Global Crossing Connect Solutions.  The downloadable applications for PCs, Blackberries, and Android devices simplify the ability of customers to manage and join in conferences and such.  No more access codes and phone numbers, just point and click.  It all comes with a standard API, making it customizable for various environments.  Global Crossing’s collaboration services have become a bigger and bigger focus for the company.

And Pacnet (news) released a study detailing a growing sophistication when it comes to hosted applications amongst Singaporean SMEs.  Apparently 9 out of 10 have already deployed at least one hosted security application this year, usually a firewall or intrusion detection.  The implication is that this small city state’s marketplace is primed for the arrival of cloud computing.  Not too surprising really, seems like a natural thing for Singapore given the rest of its dynamic but rather centralized way of doing things.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables