Orange will start Internet services in India soon

What differentiates Orange Business Services from other competitors?

One of the main differentiators is that we have a global reach. We are
everywhere in the world. The only place where we do not have presence is
Afghanistan. The second differentiator is our business model. We have adopted
regional capabilities with global model. The third differentiator is our
innovation. We really want to be ahead of others. We have invested in 4,000 labs
globally for this purpose.

How is your strategy of expanding into emerging markets paying off?

Yes, our business is doing well in Africa and the Asia Pacific region. In
fact, in some of these markets we are having double-digit growth. Recently, we
have even received license to provide Internet services in India. We are shortly
launching this initiative for our enterprise customers. We are making our
investments in the emerging markets as these are our growing markets.

How is your experiment in Africa on 'PC on Orange platform' doing? Are you
planning to replicate this in any other country?

Orange is exploring ways of offering new services-including low-cost
personal computers-to the small and medium business market in Africa. To keep
costs down the PCs would act as network computers, with data stored centrally,
and that would also help to reduce energy consumption. This is doing well. Along
with this we are looking at offering a couple of other initiatives like cloud
and virtualization. We are taking these to twenty-eight other countries.

'Virtualization of IT' was your latest buzzword. What is the progress on
this front?

Virtualization of IT is something that Orange is applying in all parts of
the world where it operates. This is part of our cloud computing initiative. We
are offering complete cloud computing services, from infrastructure to real-time
business applications.

We have already rolled out successful cloud services, such
as desktop virtualization, and hosted virtualized infrastructure. We are looking
at launching a dozen other services in the next twenty-four months covering six
main areas including real-time applications, collaboration, security,
infrastructure, cloud-ready networking and vertical solutions for specific
industries.

When IPv6 becomes a reality, there will be so many addresses. How are you
going to manage such vast variety of IPs and how are you going to address
security?

Yes, IPv6 will offer a lot of IPs. We feel this might become a reality in
the next couple of years. There is a significant focus on machine-to-machine
services. We feel that there is a lot of scope for connecting
machine-to-machine. The aim is to make sure we can connect objects on the
network using security certified IPv6. Enterprises are always looking to gain
efficiencies in their business models and increase their competitiveness.
Location tracking, diagnostics and remote maintenance-by communicating with
equipment in the field, such as truck fleets, electricity meters or medical
devices-are very promising. We are looking at offering more M2M services.

What is the future of unified communications?

Unified communication is a hot topic as companies are looking at manaing the
complexity of multiple devices and communication channels more effectively.
Going forward, unified communications will transform. Some of the emerging
applications/technologies like social networking and cloud computing will become
part of unified communications.

Unified communications is a progression from converged
communications that put voice, video, and data on a single network, now moving
to essentially support in the modern working and communications practices in
businesses.

Srinivas R/CMN

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in