In an increasingly software-defined, cloud-based, AI-driven world, how can telcos ensure that their network and infrastructure investments remain relevant to customers looking to create new opportunities and efficiencies?
Through a B2B lens, French telco Orange’s enterprise unit, Orange Business, acknowledges that it’s currently navigating its way through its own digital transformation while helping its customers with theirs.
Over the last few years OB (formerly Orange Business Services) has pivoted from offering voice services to becoming a digital transformation facilitator, offering customers digital integration in the areas where connectivity meets data, cloud, and cyber security.
So, how will this translate into technology offerings, services and partnerships and what innovations can customers expect going forward?
On a bright winter’s day at Orange Gardens, the firm’s research showcase hub, situated in the quaint, Parisian suburb of Châtillon, the telco invited a range of customers, partners and employees from all areas of its business to check out some of the innovations that most illustrate its strategy during one of its ‘Orange Open Tech’ days.
The Orange Group’s newly-installed executive vice-president and chief technology and information officer Bruno Zerbib was also on hand to provide insight.
Zerbib, who has spent the last 25 years working in Silicon Valley at Big Tech firms including HP, Cisco and Yahoo, said that one of the draws to return to Paris was the intersection that telcos such as Orange find themselves at right now.
By owning the networks and opening them up to developers and hyperscalers, telcos are able to create new ecosystems, partnerships and services.
“Ten years ago I would not have joined Orange. It would have been very hard,” says Zerbib, who holds dual French-US citizenship.
“I would have been going to an environment where I would not have had access to cutting edge technology. What has changed is the fact that now we are extremely well connected to those ecosystems,” he says.
The exec says his approach is unashamedly software-driven, and his American-French accent is punctuated with West Coast tech-bro speak with terms such as “breaking down silos”, “openness”, “agile” and of course, “scaling” mentioned frequently.
Zerbib starts, however, with some plain, headline-grabbing, West Coast disruption: an announcement that 5G will be the last ‘G’ that the telco launches as it moves towards a path of “continuous innovation and improvement”.
For too long now, says Zerbib, the telco world has been “stuck in a generational paradigm”.
He adds: “Our customers are telling us is that they didn’t’ feel much difference between 4G and 5G and they should but we failed terms of communications.”
“We should have talked about the efficiency we created in terms of energy consumption and how we improved the reliability of our networks,” he adds.
Orange will not be marketing 6G, he states, favouring updates on “reducing carbon dioxide emissions; improving latency and enabling new capabilities for enterprise customers that will unlock the third wave of IoT where we will be enabling all those industrial use cases.”
He adds: “We will be able to essentially control robots remotely or you will be able to embrace those very low latency applications. We don’t’ have to talk about one big generational improvement.”
There’s been a growing sense among telcos recently that their customers are fed up of talking about generations, and would prefer to talk about capabilities and features instead.
BT’s chief technology officer Howard Watson referred to this at Mobile World Congress last year, urging the industry to make sure it monetises 5G before rushing into 6G.
Elsewhere it’s been suggested that operators may wish to introduce 6G through software-based feature upgrades, which is similar to Zerbib’s suggestions.
Following the work it has done to open up its networks to developers to create an API framework, as well as the joint operator API initiative launched at MWC last year, which it supports through mobile body GSMA, Orange says it is heralding in a new era of openness and partnerships.
Zerbib reasons, therefore, that the French incumbant is no longer a connectivity provider but a platform that can offer a range of services to its enterprise and start up customers through APIs, just like the hyperscalers.
“We can provide edge computing capabilities; we can run new emerging use cases and workloads that will require extremely low latency,” he says.
Not only do the APIs Orange uses have to be standardised, Zerbib acknowledges, they must also be simple to use and use-case driven.
In this brave new world, he also predicts further collaboration with hyperscalers, which, he observes, have built up successful communities with developers.
This telco-as-a platform model will change everything, he reasons. “We’ll tell our customers; you want to build your own private network? Sure. 5G core-as-a-service? We can expose that to you. You want your own dedicated 5G-as-SiM network? You can have that as well.”
It’s a big shift, he acknowledges, and customers can expect the roll out of some of these announcements “in a very agile manner over the next year.”
When we later speak with Jean Bolot – the group’s research director since 2021, and also a dual French-US passport holder – he adds that the next stage in Orange’s telco-as-a-platform journey will be using AI to automate networks so that they are autonomous or semi-autonomous.
“This will enable networks to automatically employ a slice via a chatbot or increase security,” he says. So again, the emphasis in the future will be on improving the efficiency and security of the networks, rather than adding more bandwidth.
According to Zerbib, Orange’s successful cybersecurity division Orange Cyberdefense is indeed expected to play a key role in Orange Business, with hundreds of new hires and a revenue target of 1.3 billion Euros for 2025.
During the open tech event one of its key cyber security technologies on display was an aptly titled phishing detection system called Hookalert.
Based on machine learning algorithms, the system alerts company employees when they visit a suspicious site – even ones that have never previously been visited or analysed.
A second technology, Trust System, is a scalable machine learning AI model whose job is to block attacks and suspicious behaviours without bothering the user.
According to Orange, Trust System has already been rolled out to orange.fr sites and apps, where it evaluates approximately 500 million requests per month.
The provision of 5G private mobile networks for industry 4.0, logistics and live events remains a key offering from Orange.
There was a demo that showed how to such networks could be used to transport video for remote production – a handy use case with the Paris Olympics coming up, although Orange says that most of its customers in this space currently involve industrial 4.0 use cases.
And this was where most of the interesting demos seemed to lie. Situated in the telco-as-a-platform zone, for instance, was a use case involving an industrial digital twin in a pharmaceutical lab.
A partnership between Orange5GLabs, robotics arm manufacturer arm Stäubli , Belgium engineering firm Cilyx and mixed reality software outfit Mr Watts, it involved setting up a remote pharmaceutical cleanroom to manufacture and test medicines.
It featured a robotic arm controlled via smart glasses and connected to Orange’s SA 5G network. A digital twin of the robotic arm was created to be used in combination with MS HoloLens2 or a desktop app.
Orange claims that this ‘virtual sibling’ is a fully interactive 3D visualisation of the arm – it’s photorealistic and very low latency. Being able to operate the process and access information like this remotely has the potential to save manufacturing plans time and money.
According to the demonstrator of this concept, whenever his boss, Olivier Nerinckx, who looks after 4.0 at Orange, goes to domain-specific conferences or exhibitions, other IT firms – the IBMs, the Intels, and the Ciscos of this world – are often surprised to see him there, but this, he adds, are where the new doors are opening.
“You have to educate them,” he says. “We go to conferences across different verticals because they open doors that were not opened before for Orange.
“We are having real conversations with pharma and bio tech companies. Because we need to be able to provide complete solutions, but we can’t do this on our own. We need partners.”
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