Few people in business understand the connection between network advancements and customer experience as well as Orange Wholesale International’s CEO Emmanuel Rochas. “Orange Wholesale is all about ‘powering global connectivity.’ But what about the actual people who use our services, working for operators and content providers worldwide? We want to empower them as well, enable them to do more, as simply and smoothly as changing mobile plans with a smartphone swipe,” Rochas explains.
Agile networks at the core
Orange Wholesale is in an especially favourable position to achieve this ambition, as the global connectivity services wholesaler can now rely on in-house network-building capacities and innovation factories. Orange Wholesale’s efforts are paying off with a full softwarisation of network functions making it possible to activate new network resources without further physical hardware deployment. Software functions can be orchestrated in real time thanks to a powerful network automation layer. These effectively enable digital procurement.
“Over the last few years, our operations have evolved dramatically thanks to this digitalisation, allowing to move from months to minutes to activate a new services,” saysJean-Louis Le Roux, EVP Orange international networks at Orange Wholesale. “We want to empower our customers with the flexibility this whole drive is giving us.”
Exactly how this empowerment translates into digital services was guided by the customers themselves: “We’ve met them, surveyed them to collect their wishes. They all want more tools, more autonomy, more simplicity. I’m excited to tell them that we’ve advanced far enough to release Click,” Rochas explains.
Delivering the promises of NaaS as simply as with a Click
The conceptual framework behind Click is ambitious: “With Network-as-a-Service, a major trend in the Telco ecosystem, network services can be managed on demand, without long-term commitment, allowing more business flexibility to cater to changing demands,” Rochas says.
“Another trend is the Platform-approach, which refers to a new way of piloting the business and interacting with the telco ecosystem, creating and managing activity on top of exposed services, right from your dashboard.
“Click is where these two trends meet. It embodies our global approach of digital transformation applied to customer experience. It involves making any operation on the services we offer to our customers and partners, all the interactions with us, all the user experience as simple, responsive and adaptive as a click. This means transparency and efficiency through on-demand, 24/7 self-service and a promise of continuing innovation.”
Future-proof, user-friendly features
Concretely, Click enables seamless access to network capacities and solutions on demand, through APIs or from Orange Wholesale’s user cockpit. The digital interface of Click includes a growing number of features related to online ordering, offer management, billing, and customer service including ticketing.
Call-collect numbers, IPL, IP Transit or EVPL online (Ethernet Virtual Private Line) can be ordered from the platform. Route specific, secure direct connection management, performance monitoring, bandwidth allocation can be tweaked.
And there are other niceties like billing and ticketing follow-up, by-the-minute insights, escalation matrix or user privilege management, with bespoke user-friendly environments for finance people, sourcing staff or service managers.
Standard APIs are used and exposed in the same customer experience logic: Ticketing features can be integrated into other clients, and Orange Wholesale customers can access partner network capabilities right from the Click interface.
Jean-Louis Le Roux enthusiastically talks about what’s to come, as Click will “enable 5G Core-Network-as-a-Service and IMS As-a-Service”, while Rochas mentions the integration of AI, digital ordering for CDN or 5G Signaling, self-onboarding of digital prospects, further partner aggregation, delivery progress visualisation.
“The potential is unleashed. That’s the beauty of it, the whole meaning of digital transformation. By launching Click, we’re embarking our customers on our journey. We’re building ways to the future, for them, and with them”.
