Orange builds innovative virtual workspace to support the demands of the engineering industry

A multinational engineering company, faced with a rapidly changing marketplace, was looking for a secure workspace in the cloud to support flexible working.

The company’s employees often work remotely utilizing demanding applications such as design and simulation software and wanted a virtual workspace they could actively use. At the same time, it realized that to attract new design talent, it needed to offer access to cutting-edge technologies.

The company investigated solutions that would work in an engineering environment, but found they were either very expensive or too regionally focused. After looking around for a suitable partner, the engineering company approached Orange Business to create a suitable solution using its innovation expertise.

Opening a virtual design environment

Orange and its start-up partner QAP 360, which specializes in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for the engineering industry, developed a secure global workspace. The solution has the compute power to handle highly-complex and demanding engineering applications.

VDI essentially moves desktop management from a local to a virtualized environment, where applications are hosted on a virtual machine (VM) running on a centralized server. One of the main benefits of VDI is that it stores data in a data center, making even very large files accessible to users regardless of device or location. Many computer-aided design (CAD) files are by their nature very large, so are perfectly suited to this approach.

Orange and QAP 360’s engineering-focused workspace-as-a-service solution is built on Orange Flexible Engine and workspace technology from Huawei. Orange Flexible Engine provides elastic services to support large workloads across a global, unified infrastructure. Huawei Workspace, a cloud-based desktop service, supports multiple devices. The solution also draws on QAP 360’s extensive experience in the engineering VDI space.

Orange ran a proof of concept (PoC) to test the concept, and then the solution was piloted with a small team of design engineers. Following the success of the pilot, the engineering company is on-boarding other business units and applications to expand the use of the powerful platform.

A trailblazer in the engineering sector

The virtual workspace has helped the engineering company be recognized as a pioneer in its field. At the same time, it has shown off the innovation and development skills of Orange, opening up a host of new opportunities in other sectors, such as agricultural engineering.