In response to an increasingly mobile workforce, Orange Business Services is launching a new initiative to collaborate with enterprise customers in the development of customized Cisco Spark applications.

The new initiative -- Cisco Spark by Orange Open Labs -- will be in full swing in the first quarter of 2018 with the opening of a number of Orange Open Labs in North America, Europe and Asia, where Orange's enterprise customers can develop their own Cisco Spark applications to meet their business requirements.

Michael Burrell, global practice director of unified communications for Orange Business Services, says Orange is building 11 labs total -- eight labs in Europe, two in the US and one in Singapore (See Orange Business Services Surpasses 200K User Subscriptions for Cisco Spark .)

"The Lab is a place where you can go and solve problems, use it as an incubator or sandbox, and ultimately devise, discover and build application interfaces to this rich collaborative environment," he says.

With the launch of Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) Spark by Orange Open Labs, Orange Business Services aims to enable end users to better leverage their cloud-based and company-specific applications within the Cisco Spark environment, adds Burrell.

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Orange Business Services started offering Cisco Spark to its customers in 2016, and Burrell says this unified communication service is more heavily utilized by Orange's enterprise customers in the pharmaceutical, mining, manufacturing and retail verticals. Currently, 20 multinational customers and 200,000 users are utilizing Cisco Spark by Orange.

Cisco Spark is a cloud-based business messaging platform where colleagues can host meetings of 25 to 200 participants, share files, access over 100 cloud-based applications and more. In addition, Burrell says Cisco Spark by Orange integrates with platforms like Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and Microsoft Exchange.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading