Creating a platform advantage for customers

Over the past decade, the rise to dominance of cloud models has raised expectations for choice and convenience in service delivery. Enterprise customers are growing accustomed to the huge number of different vendors available via cloud platforms and the almost unlimited compute and storage power available on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. It became obvious to Orange Business that customers would inevitably want to consume infrastructure services on the same basis, and the company took the first steps in its platformization journey.  

Today, these efforts have resulted in a trio of different platform offerings. Live Intelligence in a GenAI platform that was developed in-house and made available on the market to give customers a trusted foundation for scalable and responsible AI initiatives. Cloud Avenue is a secure, sovereign, and flexible IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) platform that gives customers the freedom to choose where to run their IT and AI workloads. Completing the set is Evolution Platform, the creation of which reflected the growing influence of SASE and IaaS/NaaS models, and which is leading a revolution in the structure and design of infrastructure services. 

Orange Business realized the telco sector’s focus on resilience and security had sacrificed agility for resilience, leaving organizations unable to adapt to changing business circumstances at the speed the business required. It was also becoming clear that, in a digital world, infrastructures were core to the delivery of the experiences that organizations must deliver to customers and employees. This fundamentally changed the nature of what customers would demand from Orange Business.  

Where once the focus was on providing technical services to deliver outcomes such as availability, latency, and performance, we were now asked in addition to deliver on business outcomes such as better user experiences, improved sustainability, greater productivity, and enhanced operational resilience. This required us to be problem solvers, as well as technicians. This would require us to fundamentally rethink how cloud integration, network connectivity, and cybersecurity services are provisioned – while retaining the robust, reliable real-world connectivity that customers expected from us.  

Our determination to deliver these outcomes for customers became the driving force behind the development of the Evolution Platform. It enables customers to compose, deploy, and adjust infrastructure services on demand, according to their business needs. It automates service creation by providing seamless connectivity between customers and their infrastructure and applications, providing autonomous access to services delivered with a ‘cloud-like’ experience.  

The customer was top of mind when designing every aspect of Evolution Platform. A simple, self-service portal with automated zero-touch/light-touch provisioning is the standard way of provisioning services (although more technologically-minded customers can address this directly as code through API-driven code developer interfaces). Customers can spin up telco-grade services in four steps, in less than 15 minutes, or create a virtual data center in 30 minutes. All services are offered with a consumption-based pricing model, and the platform’s dashboard enables customers to have complete visibility of all service costs (including those of third parties like the cloud providers). 

Customers can currently choose from 25 different solutions across 16 partners (including Fortinet, Palo Alto, Cisco, HPE Aruba, and Zscaler): these can be activated/ deactivated as needed, and usage can be adjusted at any time. The integration (‘chaining’) of these applications is handled automatically, and the end-to-end SLAs customers expect from Orange Business are applied to the resulting services. This choice of ecosystem partner prevents vendor lock-in and offers additional agility: if, for example, a new vendor emerges that more closely matches a customers’ needs than their incumbent, or if one of their suppliers is acquired by a competitor that is not aligned with their business interests, then customers can seamlessly switch providers while retaining the same platform experience.  

Another of the key benefits of Evolution Platform is that cutting-edge technologies are natively integrated into it, so customers can access these innovations with little or no effort on their part. This is often a stark contrast to their experience in a non-platform world. Zero Trust, Generative AI (GenAI), and data sovereignty initiatives are great examples of this.  

• HPE’s 2026 Zero Trust report found that, “82 percent view Universal Zero Trust Network Access as essential to their security strategy, yet only 17 percent have fully implemented it  – a 65-point divide between strategic intent and operational reality in Zero Trust adoption1.” It reported that the challenge is no longer intent but execution: many organizations struggle to unite “fragmented tools, policies, and signals into one adaptive security fabric that enforces continuous verification from edge to cloud”. By contrast, Evolution Platform integrates Zero Trust directly into the network architecture, rather than adding it as an afterthought, to eliminate many of these challenges for customers.  
• Many companies also struggle to operationalize their GenAI Proofs of Concept (PoCs) into enterprise-wide services. In fact, MIT’s 2025 report, ‘GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business’, found that 95% of pilots stall at the PoC stage and never progress to scaled adoption. Evolution Platform excels here too, with on-demand, scalable connectivity that allows customers to handle the high-performance demands of Generative AI (GenAI) and data-intensive AI workloads by ramping up bandwidth and compute resources as needed. It bridges the gap between AI PoCs and industrial-scale production by combining connectivity, multi-cloud access, and cybersecurity into a single, managed infrastructure. It is also designed to support multi-cloud environments and edge computing, giving customers the flexibility to host their GenAI services where it makes the most sense for their use case.  
• Data sovereignty has also become a boardroom concern, with analyst firm BARC finding that more than 80 percent of business leaders cite data sovereignty as a strategic priority2. Evolution Platform responds to that need by offering a real choice in the way sovereign cloud can be implemented. Although not (yet!) a fully platformized option, Evolution Platform allows cloud connectivity to be ‘public’, IP-Sec based, or ‘private’ – and it even brings native connectivity to SecNumCloud Service providers such as Cloud Avenue or Bleu. Customers can select for a given feature, ensuring that their partner corresponds to their level of requirements. Overall, Evolution Platform provides a robust, resilient platform on which we can help customers to build adapted solutions with the right sovereignty integration using our worldwide implementation and operations teams.  

In a world where traditional certainties can no longer be counted upon, it can be difficult for customers to know who they can trust. This is particularly true of the infrastructure services that form the foundation of every critical experience their organization needs to deliver. The challenge is compounded by the fact that what works today might be irrelevant tomorrow. So, customers need a partner for the long haul, without the complications of vender lock-in.

At Orange Business, we believe that trust cannot be claimed: it can only be earned. We have earned our customers’ trust by safeguarding their critical networks and data for decades. That same trust is evident in the fact that more than 400 customers are already relying on Evolution Platform to provide a high degree of resiliency for their mission-critical infrastructure services and to support continuous innovation.  

The wider industry is also putting its faith in our insights, resources, and customer commitment. In an article describing how we are leading the way in reinventing traditional telco models for real impact, Analyst HFS said that, “Enterprise buyers under pressure to deliver flexible, sovereign, and resilient digital infrastructure should pay close attention” to our platformization efforts3. The same article went on to say, “Evolution Platform will transform service delivery [enabling customers to] simplify vendor complexity and control costs with a single, flexible backbone.”  

Like all our platformization initiatives, Evolution Platform is a testament to our customer-centric approach. By anticipating market shifts and prioritizing the needs of its customers, we are positioning ourselves as the partner customers can trust to deliver innovative, outcome-driven solutions that empower businesses to thrive in the digital age.