Platformization brings agility to digital infrastructure

What if digital infrastructure could be procured in a way that helps you break free of these constraints? Instead of a vendor-centric model with rigid contracts, how about procuring services as required with the ability to mix and match technologies across regions? And all the while maintaining service coherence and visibility across the entire digital infrastructure.  

The way to do this is through platformization based on service composability. This allows enterprises to build services from interchangeable components, enhancing agility and reducing vendor lock-in – all enabled by APIs that provide access to them. I like to think of it as a digital operating system for cloud computing.

By its nature, platformization offers increased elasticity in digital infrastructure acquisition. It gives you the ability to scale up or down, experiment, and adapt – allowing you to take advantage of platformization at any stage of your digital maturity. However, some level of organizational maturity is necessary to adopt platformization, such as having a strategy, integrated teams, and governance. 

Digital infrastructure platformization can be likened to the marketplace services offered by hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Similarly, Orange Business is becoming a marketplace for hyperconnectivity, where customers can select from a range of networking, security, observability, and sovereign cloud services.  

And because we own and operate our own global network infrastructure, we offer service level agreements (SLA) and end-to-end service guarantees, with visibility across the entire infrastructure. This consistency and coherency of service is a differentiating guarantee to serve your users by chaining different tech elements together.

Flexibility in licensing with rolling yearly contracts can control costs to help test enterprise use cases when you are dealing with limited budgets. In addition to the advantage of not being locked into rigid network contracts, we offer customers bandwidth-based pricing for their cloud connectivity, which can significantly optimize your cloud costs.  

Furthermore, platformization simplifies digital infrastructure architecture, reducing the need for large IT teams and long integration projects. It allows you to bring to life the same mindset you use when deploying your innovations of “start small, test and scale”. 

Composability is becoming increasing crucial as it enables a best-of breed approach to select modular services, such as one vendor for networking and another for security and combine them seamlessly. Composability gives the flexibility to compose services dynamically based on specific geographic or regulatory needs, for example – rather than viewing infrastructure as a monolithic investment.  

In fact, composability is a crucial part in shifting from a technology-first mindset to a service-first mindset. Rather than focusing on technology, what if enterprises can think about what services they want and then choose the necessary components to deliver it? And irrespective of which vendor, users would still have the same service experience.  

In addition, each composable element in the blueprint can be switched without disrupting the service, because they have all been pre-tested on the platform. Technology from the new vendor would typically use 80-90% of the existing design to minimize migration time and effort. This means that changing vendors would take a matter of days or a couple of weeks, rather than months. The beauty and power of our open approach is that you access our expertise and blueprints of different technology designs that can be adapted and implemented in your environment.  

We are taking an API-first approach to platformization, rather than focusing on a portal that does it all. An API-first mindset means that all services and capabilities are accessible and controllable via APIs. Through it, our customers can automate provisioning, scaling, and management of services without relying on manual interfaces or portals.  

APIs give customers the ability to spin up services, adjust bandwidth, and manage infrastructure programmatically, just like in AWS or Azure. It also allows customers to integrate the Orange Tier-1 backbone into their environments and compose services dynamically using their own orchestration tools. This is because we built our platform to be open and interoperable, allowing integration with third-party tools and systems.

APIs also support do-it-yourself models and co-innovation, where customers can build and manage services on top of Orange’s infrastructure. By exposing all services via APIs, the platform ensures that it can evolve with customer needs, support new technologies, and scale globally without architectural overhauls.

We believe that your digital infrastructure is a key enabler to help you break free from the constraints of the traditional rigid IT approach. This goes beyond just connectivity, it is about embedding Security by design, right from the start and optimizing your Cloud environments. Vendor-agnostic platforms using composability and APIs allow you to harness the power of automation, scale services up and down as required, adapt to new technology and market changes without having a digital infrastructure that is always playing catchup.  

While this might seem like a huge transformation for you compared to today, let me reassure you that this is not the case. The success of this approach allows you to mature your digital infrastructure as a journey rather than the old school big bang approach.  

It allows you to reap benefits sooner, prove the return-on-investment (ROI) to your internal stakeholders and break any internal Net-Sec or Cloud-Security-Network silos. Our maturity assessment can determine any initial steps that you should take, along with our consultants’ support to plan your own journey.

Ultimately, platformization is the foundation of a new operating model that is essential to keep pace with your business innovation. By breaking free from rigid 5- to 7-year technology investments, this new model gives enterprises the ability to develop shorter-term, more flexible and agile testable service deployments, which can scale or pivot as demands evolve.  

What would be the possibilities you would like to explore if you could break free from your existing constraints? Feel free to reach out to us and what a pleasure it would be to help you find a way to bring those possibilities to life!