Why Orange Business is building an AI-native IT stack from the ground up
Orange Business recently announced a strategic partnership with Blue Planet for a key part of its greenfield IT transformation. In a recent interview, Hriday Ravindranath, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Orange Business, and Joe Cumello, Senior VP and General Manager at Blue Planet, explained what they're building and why they're taking this approach to create radically better experiences for enterprise customers.
Here's what's driving this transformation and how they're executing it.
The problem: IT stack built for a previous generation
Orange Business serves customers ranging from small and medium-sized enterprises to the largest multinational companies, delivering dependable end-to-end services from connectivity to digital services. Their customers' needs are changing due to the impact of AI, cloud, and network modernization. But it's not just what customers want to consume—it's how they want to consume it.
"They want to completely move online. They want to use our portals, they want to integrate with us using APIs," Hriday said. "So, the entire service experience needs to be completely digitized. This is what our customers expect from us."
Orange Business is reimagining each part of its product portfolio as next-generation digital products with new customer journeys. The problem? Their existing IT stack wasn't built for this.
"When you look at our IT stack, it's built for a previous generation," Hriday explained. That disconnect led to a decision: to build a new, greenfield IT stack from the ground up.
The approach: Top-down strategic decision
Joe noted that customers tackle transformation in two main ways. Some organizations take a top-down approach, making strategic decisions that drive alignment across all functions—like Orange Business is doing. Others start with specific use cases or business problems and expand from there.
"The biggest challenge occurs when there's a lack of internal alignment," Joe said. "A lack of internal alignment between different organizations, between the partners and the vendors that are being brought to the table triggers a whole set of things such as corresponding cost and complexity, escalations, etc."
The transformations that go smoothest have a clear vision, well-managed timelines, and executive sponsorship across all functions. Orange Business had that alignment.
The selection process: RFP plus hackathon
Orange Business wanted a best-of-breed approach that was fully modular. They ran an extensive RFP process that lasted several months. However, they also did something different: they ran a hackathon for about a month, inviting multiple partners to compete in a real-world environment with actual use cases.
After that process, they selected Blue Planet specifically for service fulfillment and service assurance. Several factors drove that decision.
Why Blue Planet
AI-powered capabilities
Blue Planet's AI-powered capabilities for service fulfillment and assurance were critical. Orange Business sought to integrate AI across its operations, and Blue Planet's recent developments in this area aligned with its vision.
Cloud-native
"It needed to fundamentally be cloud-native because we wanted to deploy it on our sovereign infrastructure, which is a critical requirement. This is especially important to serve our French and European customers, delivering services in a trusted way due to the regulatory environment," Hriday said.
Standards alignment
Blue Planet is active in the TM Forum and Mplify Alliances. "They also drive the industry bodies to conform to a set of standards, and this was quite important to us as a company," Hriday noted.
Data-driven architecture
Blue Planet was a clear leader in data-driven architecture, which provides the foundation for AI and automation.
Out-of-box adapters
The platform has a large catalog of adapters. "We can basically add a new vendor or add a new component in a really quick and flexible way without having to rebuild all of that ourselves," Hriday explained.
How they're measuring success
Joe mentioned that every operator looks at their success measurements differently, but breaks the general categories into two buckets:
- Customer experience KPIs include improved time to service, better order fulfillment, and reduced outages. These measurements correlate to reduced churn and keeping revenue flowing.
- Operational efficiency KPIs include the number of platforms being retired, cost reductions from those retirements, and the number of closed-loop processes being activated. "Closed-loop processes tell you exactly where automation is fitting in and how many manual processes are disappearing," Joe said. Manual interventions cost money. These metrics also track the automation of new service deployment and how quickly those services reach customers. All of these signals reduced complexity, lower costs, and faster time-to-market.
A different partnership model
Orange Business sought to transform its approach to working with technology partners. Traditionally, telcos purchase software and customize it to meet their specific needs. Orange Business wanted something different.
"What we've developed in terms of our design partnership with Blue Planet is a co-innovation agreement where we can essentially drive their product roadmap based on our needs," Hriday said.
It's a win-win. Orange Business gets to influence product development based on its needs as it shifts to a fully digital operating model. Blue Planet gets to work with one of the world’s largest telcos, and those insights help drive the product for other customers, too.
"This feels like a good win-win agreement for both companies," Hriday said.
What they're building
The design partnership is already focused on several key areas.
Intent-driven orchestration and NetDevOps
Orange Business and Blue Planet are collaborating to convert operational requirements into an intent model, using AI and natural language to drive automation throughout the stack.
Digital twin capability
We're exploring digital twin capabilities that enable testing designs in a digital twin environment before deploying them into customer networks.
Closed-loop automation and self-healing
Because Orange Business is using Blue Planet for both fulfillment and assurance, they can mature the closed-loop automation and self-healing capabilities. "We are using Blue Planet to monitor the network infrastructure and our customers’ environment, but we can essentially drive the automation to actually make corrections within the environment using the fulfillment stack," Hriday explained. "It's a good combination of capabilities that helps us drive this closed-loop automation."
What's next
Orange Business made a big bet on greenfield transformation. They're building an entirely new IT stack, selected their industry-leading partners through extensive real-world testing, and structured the relationship as a co-innovation agreement rather than a traditional vendor engagement. The focus is now on bringing next-generation products to market and maturing the closed-loop automation capabilities that will differentiate their service delivery.
Watch the full interview below with Hriday Ravindranath and Joe Cumello for more details on Orange Business' transformation and their partnership with Blue Planet.