Orange has taken a huge step in the business cloud market, acquiring cloud infrastructure and critical application services firm Basefarm to help grow its Orange Business Services division.
While Orange is a strong cloud player in France, it's looking to diversify the services it provides across Europe, strengthening its hold on the cloud sector.
Basefarm already has a strong presence within Europe, particularly Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, where it offers a range of cloud-based infrastructure and services, management of critical applications and analytics to help businesses get more insight from their usage data.
"We are very proud to announce the acquisition of Basefarm, which will mark a major milestone in our international development," Helmut Reisinger, CEO of Orange Business Services, said. "In particular, the company's integration will enable us to significantly extend our big data and critical application management services on a rapidly consolidating market.
"In addition to our ability to offer access to public or private cloud infrastructure, it is above all our capacity to propose enriched, automated services to our customers, wherever they are in the world, that will enable us to support companies as they transform onto new, digital models based on cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence."
The company hasn't yet announced whether all 550 of Basearm's staff will join the 1,600 cloud computing experts at Orange Business Services or whether there will be redundancies. But Orange did explain the acquisition will give Basearm the opportunity to develop its products under the Orange umbrella, focusing on data management, big data and multi-cloud services.
The deal is worth 350 million (310 million) and is due to complete in the third quarter of this year.
