French telecom Bouygues Telecom Enterprises announced on Tuesday that it has partnered with NEC Corp. to launch Solutions Cloud Pro, a software as a service application marketplace for small businesses.

NEC has provided Bouygues with a Carrier Cloud Services platform, managed services and the Cloud Service Broker for Bouygues to operate the cloud store for its customers.

Cloud service brokerages will represent the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing through 2015, according to Gartner Research VP Tiffani Bova in a presentation last year. A more recent report by Jamcracker found that small and medium sized businesses in particular are turning more and more to cloud services brokers as they fill the trusted advisor role and help customers select the best cloud services for their needs.

“The Solutions Cloud Pro enables our small business customers to benefit from a range of on-demand business applications…traditionally only accessible by larger enterprises, are now available on a more flexible monthly tariff,” Brigitte Nicolai, SOHO Business BU, director, Bouygues Telecom Enterprises said in a statement. “Customers are no longer required to make large investments on purchasing and maintaining business applications and are able to maintain full control of their expenses because they only pay for what they use.”

“Using these SaaS applications is an innovative way for small enterprises to meet their ever changing business needs,” Dany Nassif, business development director, NEC France said in a statement. “We are proud to support Bouygues Telecom Enterprises in empowering their business customers by helping them to improve efficiency and reduce IT operational costs whilst allowing them to focus on their core business.”

According to a report by Business Cloud News, Bouygues is the third largest telecom in France, but is fairly late to the cloud game in France with SFR and Orange leading the way in terms of commercial cloud services.

Orange Business Services announced last week that it is expanding its Flexible Computing cloud offering to data centers in North America and Asia.

On Monday, French data center and cloud provider Neo Telecoms acquired a 35 percent stake in Hits Datacenter.