Canadian Telco Ormuco Launches HP Helion-Based Cloud

Montreal-based Ormuco has unveiled a hybrid cloud offering called Connected Cloud, based on HP Helion OpenStack infrastructure. The offering aims to make it easy for mid-size enterprises to migrate between cloud environments easily and to help them understand the costs associated with different parts of a project.

Connected Cloud is a single platform that provides a web portal through which customers can provision a hybrid cloud environment that transitions from private to public easily and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Ormuco focuses on providing mid-level enterprises with workload portability, data protection, and security.

At the center of the hybrid cloud offering is a longstanding relationship with HP. HP has been working on its Helion Network, a network of service providers around the world that can attach to Helion and provide cloud around the world. Ormuco is one of the charter members, alongside British Telecom, Telefonica, Intel, and numerous big service providers.

“Ormuco requires extensive geographic reach and the ability to meet customers’ in-country or cross-border cloud requirements,” said Steve Dietch, vice president for HP Helion. “With HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Network, Ormuco’s Connected Cloud customers will have access to hybrid cloud services from a global, open ecosystem of service providers.”

One of the advantages a telecom has in cloud is its existing relationships with enterprises and an understanding of their needs. A disadvantage for many telecoms in cloud is lack of agility, having to evolve the organizational thinking from legacy telco operations. Ormuco is a different kind of telecom in that its roots aren’t in the traditionally defined telco world.

For one, its CEO Orlando Bayter is in his early 30s. Bayter was a prodigy who started his first tech business when he was 11. He started Ormuco seven years ago as a managed services company.

Bayter had a revelation of a great sea change occurring in the space several years ago. That revelation was that enterprises that currently have infrastructure on-premise will increasingly watch these costs become prohibitive.

Data is growing so fast that enterprises will not be able to increase their processing power quickly enough to keep up. Several years ago, Ormuco began to work on a way for enterprises to use cloud in practice, combining cloud’s promise of agility while making it practical for enterprises with all of their needed functionality.

The forward-thinking telecom is also one of a few telecoms in Canada that has a CRTC license (Canadian Radio‑television and Telecommunications), putting it on equal footing with Verizon, Bell Canada, and Telus, said Ormuco COO Michael Malynowsky

Ormuco has data centers in Montréal, Dallas, and Sunnyvale, California, in addition to several other locations. Through the Helion Network, customers can extend beyond this footprint globally.

The company also has data center expansion plans throughout 2015 with planned data centers in New York City, Seattle, and internationally, in London and Frankfurt, to service hubs near key technology and financial markets and expand its reach throughout Europe.

The company will also look to establish data centers in the Middle East and Asia Pacific for increased global coverage and scope.

Ormuco does really well with the gaming industry in particular. One customer is Square Enix, a company best known for the biggest role playing game franchises, including Final Fantasy.

Game development is intensive, said Malynowsky, as it’s prohibitive to buy thousands a servers needed for select, limited purposes like stress testing. Its work with the gaming vertical has proven its capabilities around extreme purposes such as testing and launching games played by millions.

Ormuco provides a real-time environment with whatever features needed in its cloud, said Malynowsky. Once it’s done, the customer can push into production to either own environment all the way to Ormuco managing and supporting completely.

“It’s the flexibility of going between private and public cloud," said Malynowsky. "It's full flexibility of development and operations. It’s the full flexibility of the corporate enterprise to decide what critical elements they want to keep in cloud and to do so very easily.

The billing platform helps large enterprises understand their exact costs for granular portions of projects, said Malynowsky. The company had several ISVs signed up and using the new platform ahead of launch.