Enterprises in today's rapidly changing business landscape want managed services that can be flexibly consumed. The network-as-a-service (NaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models let you seamlessly scale network infrastructure, optimize performance and enhance operational efficiency, removing significant chunks of traditional IT complexity.
Another requirement is composability, so system resources like compute, storage and network are treated as services that can be quickly assembled and reassembled to meet changing workloads. Companies want to consume network services like they buy services on cloud hyperscalers; they want flexibility and convenience.
The shift to greater softwarization of the network using virtual network functions (VNFs) and other approaches delivers a more adaptable, scalable, secure and efficient network environment. IDC has forecast that telco cloud infrastructure, including VNFs and softwarization, will grow from $12.9 billion in 2022 to $27.3 billion in 2027, at a CAGR of 16.1% over that time.
A new type of market store
Evolution Platform from Orange Business lets you choose services from a wide variety of vendors to design a tailored network. You can select the best firewall, Security Service Edge (SSE), routers, SD-WAN edge, session border controller (SBC), or probes as “ingredients” for creating your infrastructure meal and pick the ones you want from where you want. It’s our way of enhancing service delivery for our customers.
In Evolution Platform, we work differently with partners. Vendors play a central role and manage services from the control plane, which significantly reduces service deployment times, often from several weeks to just minutes. Vendors also control release management, so software is updated more regularly, ensuring customers always get the latest version of a service at the earliest time.
We also give customers an unmatched range of vendors from which to choose services, supported by centralized service management and documentation. More than ten partners have signed up in just two years, including Fortinet, Netskope, Palo Alto, VMware, Cisco, Aviatrix and Prosimo. This extensive choice of partners ensures that customers get simplicity and scalability when designing a more composable network that prioritizes data sovereignty.
Plus, it’s not all about benefits for customers; vendors benefit, too. Vendors that sign up to offer their services from the Evolution Platform market store get access to new distribution channels and are able to integrate their solutions into the Orange Business portfolio. It opens up new paths to new sales for them, and their store membership is underpinned by the Orange world-class infrastructure, Orange Business consulting and global expertise.
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Ensuring quality and performance
With Evolution Platform, customer traffic is carried on the Orange Business network, ensuring performance and guaranteed expert support from Orange global resources.
We propose two ways of managing the data plane. One way is using a VNF approach, in which we host partner services in Evolution Platform, but that’s not the only one. We also offer direct connection between PoPs on the Orange network and services hosted in PoPs on the partner network. This guarantees the customer that traffic is always on the Orange network, ensures end-to-end high performance and builds trust in the Orange worldwide infrastructure and resources.
The wide range of vendors in Evolution Platform gives customers the maximum choice of services, which can be routers, firewalls, WAN optimization, network address translation (NAT), domain name systems (DNS), secure service edge (SSE), SD-WAN, collaboration services or multicloud networking. All of which can now be virtualized and run as a service.
These can all be combined using service chaining, a process that links services together in sequences to create more coherent and efficient service delivery and enables greater flexibility, scalability and programmability of network services. Service chaining streamlines the process and ensures that all services in your network work together more effectively.
Enabling what customers need
The Orange Business partner onboarding model prioritizes use cases, differentiation and technical feasibility that incorporates cost-effectiveness and legal compliance. We work to ensure our customers have the largest possible choice of qualified and trusted vendors, along with a single management interface and a pay-as-you-go model. We believe giving greater control to customers increases possibilities and boosts innovation. So, we focus on providing as much choice and flexibility as possible with a pricing model that works for customers.
According to the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Communications Service Provider Digital Infrastructure and Services 2023 Vendor Assessment, enterprises want “Flexible consumption of managed services through [Orange's] network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform for SD-WAN, SASE, security, IoT, and edge compute services that combine hardware, software, and life-cycle services, which are proactively managed across a multicloud public and private framework,” and it's heading towards “composable services that offer flexible pricing models.”
In addition, we appreciate that some customers will want to develop their own software solutions based on their own ideas and requirements, so we have decided to offer all the services in Evolution Platform as APIs. By opening up the infrastructure, we believe companies can be more innovative in how they manage their networks. Evolution Platform is cloud-native, ready to integrate seamlessly with customers’ cloud strategies.
Evolution Platform and vendor ecosystem maximize softwarization
Evolution Platform gives you the control and choice to manage your network on your terms and get the most from softwarization. It has been tailored to enterprise requirements and is a composable, high-performance platform that provides security, personalized orchestration and enhanced user experience.
We also appreciate that no two customer needs are the same, so we designed a new way to help customers with à la carte service and different levels of service management.
You can have global service management for all services hosted on Evolution Platform. Under that model, vendors are responsible for their own releases, and Orange manages the services for customers. Or you can have dedicated service management per service, where you choose the individual services: for example, you might have some in-house SD-WAN capabilities and only need support for SSE. Again, it's all about choice and flexibility.
Orange Business is the trusted partner enterprises need to make the most of the softwarized network, with access to an unparalleled vendor ecosystem that gives you genuinely flexible consumption of managed services through NaaS and IaaS.
Thomas Finot is the Evolution Platform Product Owner at Orange Business. He is responsible for Orange Business technology partners onboarding for SSE, SD-WAN and other security, connectivity, collaboration and IOT services. Thomas defines the new technical and business standards to accelerate the deployment and integration of partner solutions on Evolution Platform.