- Orange Business partnered with ServiceNow, Splunk, Ciena and CGS
- The operator is redesigning its product portfolio to deliver simplified AI-native experiences to customers
- Demand for legacy B2B services is shifting to next-gen AI-powered digital services
Orange Business is revitalizing its digital services at a time when enterprises are moving along their AI journey at a good clip. By partnering with ServiceNow, Splunk, Ciena (Blue Planet) and CSG, it's gearing up to offer enterprises a “fully digital-native and AI-powered" experience.
The operator's ultimate goal is to refresh its current product line to fit in more AI-enabled solutions and present a holistic digital ecosystem for enterprises looking to implement AI at scale that supports their deployment efforts, which it views as an avenue for telcos to reverse their sluggish revenue growth.
“By partnering with industry leaders, we are building a next-generation, fully digital, and AI-native Orange Business,” said Hriday Ravindranath, CTO in an announcement about the partnerships. “This is a holistic transformation across the entire business focused on delivering simplicity, flexibility, and trusted solutions that truly make a difference.”
In an interview with TM Forum's Inform, Usman Javaid, chief product and marketing officer, underlined the importance of leveraging AI. “I think it's a moment of winners and losers. Those who see AI as an opportunity to grow again are the ones who are going to win, and those who miss the boat on AI are going to completely lose,” he said.
Sahem Azzam, president, Middle East & Africa, and Asia, Orange Business, shared in a blog post, “A survey carried out by Global Data for Orange Business, found that 43% of enterprises had concerns that their network infrastructure would hold back their GenAI plans. They needed access to more bandwidth and reduced latency networks for GenAI applications to be usable in production settings.”
What the partnership provides
The present alliance will first and foremost support the service provider’s “greenfield IT ecosystem” making solutions simpler, more flexible, and trusted – and in the long run, enable it to reposition itself as a key player in the enterprise AI space.
Each partner will lend a set of capabilities to help build a “secure, modular, and future-proof digital ecosystem,” the company said. For example, ServiceNow’s AI platform will help streamline and speed up organization-wide project and service management. Likewise, Splunk will introduce deep observability and data-driven monitoring capabilities to support real-time analytics. Ciena's Blue Planet adds AI-native network management and intelligent automation that can significantly cut down the time it takes to deploy new services.
“Orange Business’ strategic partnership with ServiceNow, Splunk, Ciena (Blue Planet), and CSG is positioned to augment and advance enterprise AI journeys,” said Ron Westfall, practice lead at HyperFRAME Research. “These partnerships are pivotal to Orange Business's transformation into building its ecosystem credentials as an AI-native network and digital integrator – especially as many enterprises are at the front-end of their organization-wide AI implementation journeys.”
By embedding advanced AI and automation from these partners into its own operations, Orange aims to uplevel its network, making it more efficient, agile, and data-driven, he said.
“Our transformation is not just about technology: it’s about how we create radically better experiences for our customers,” Ravindranath said.
"There are different paths to achieve an AI-powered platform to run a carrier business on. Even as Orange Business has been building in-house capabilities in and a deep knowledge of AI, they are running a smart playbook in leveraging partners who have proven track records in being agile and technology-forward. This allows Orange Business to achieve better time-to-value for their enterprise customers," Roy Chua, industry analyst and founder of AvidThink, told Fierce Network via email.
On demand solutions
The new stack comes with a host of solutions that can be consumed on demand. According to Orange Business, these will dramatically accelerate organizations’ time-to-market.
It is not the first time Orange Business has teamed up with industry leaders. In June, the French telco strengthened its alliance with Nvidia – a key partner – by joining the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) network, incorporating NVIDIA’s GPU technologies and software capabilities into its Live Intelligence platform.
“With capabilities such as sovereign AI solutions through NVIDIA, Orange Business can address critical data residency concerns for European clients, solidifying its position as a trusted partner and enabling it to better serve enterprises by focusing on enhancing customer, workforce and operational experiences,” Westfall said.
This article was updated on July 11, 2025, at 1:26 p.m. to include the comment from Roy Chua of AvidThink.