Taking the best from the Telco, cloud, and Systems Integration worlds

The traditional boundaries between cloud, network connectivity, and cybersecurity are merging into interconnected infrastructure services. Modern applications are increasingly "cloud-native," utilizing containerization and functions that run directly within cloud service architectures. Networking extends beyond simple connectivity with identity access, threat detection, and segmentation embedded directly into the network fabric. Edge computing (local processing) and cloud computing (centralized processing) are merging into a single continuum.  

Four years ago, when the team members responsible for what we know today as Evolution Platform were planning for the future, they were well aware that these worlds were merging. Their challenge was to take only the best from each of these three worlds – the Telco world of connectivity, the System Integration world that brought together component parts into a single, tailored solution, and the Cloud world of the Hyperscalers. Each of these worlds held distinct advantages.

For decades, the Telco world has been synonymous with control – providing the SLAs and guaranteed service standards that customers demand and the resilience that delivers cyber risk management. Telcos provide secure connectivity that protects sensitive data and ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and information. Security and connectivity are therefore tied together.  

The Hyperscalers that have dominated the cloud world are synonymous with convenience, the frictionless delivery of services featuring instant, self-serve provisioning, consumption-based pricing, on-demand storage & compute on a global scale. The cloud supports – and customers expect – frictionless programmability, zero-touch provisioning innovation, microservices, etc. The cloud model appeals to customers because innovation can be rolled out quickly, and all services are accessible on demand. 

Systems Integrators offer a high degree of choice and thrive on customization and adaptability. They bridge gaps by integrating products and services from multiple vendors, providing customers with the freedom to choose best-of-breed solutions.  

However, there are drawbacks to each of these worlds: 

• The telco world’s prioritization of resilience and scale often made it difficult and time-consuming to incorporate changes to service design.  
• Companies relying solely on the cloud had concerns about data sovereignty, vendor lock-in, and the need to ensure guaranteed connectivity to their cloud partner – and there is growing alarm about unpredictable and often high costs.  
• And the complexity of integrating disparate systems inherent to the Systems Integration world often introduced risks and slowed down implementation. 

Recognizing the strengths and limitations of each world, Evolution Platform – Orange Business’s industry-leading Network-as-a-Service solution – empowers customers to (re)configure network and security services in near real-time. This groundbreaking solution blends control, convenience, and choice. Customers can ‘pick and mix’ from a wide range of virtualised network functions from a growing number of partners embedded onto Evolution Platform. It is also AI-infused and GenAI-ready, ensuring customers can leverage these advanced capabilities while maintaining a secure and agile environment. 

As the underlying ‘chaining’ of these services is automated, customers can spin up telco-grade services in less than 15 minutes and create a virtual network and security hub in half an hour. Evolution Network puts network leaders back in control, enabling them to harness the reliability of Telco connectivity, the agility of cloud technologies, and the flexibility of SI integrations – all from a single, unified platform. 

The control customers crave is delivered through the investments we have made (and continue to make) in our globally meshed, high-performance backbone. Owning our infrastructure enables us to deliver the observability and orchestration that customers need – without it, provisioning and security are at risk. Controlling the entire technical stack is the only way to deliver the SLAs on end-to-end performance that will allow customers to support their business strategies with confidence. All components on Evolution Platform have been pre-tested to ensure optimal performance, end-to-end service chaining, and maximum resilience, all backed by comprehensive SLAs; and each service features sub-15ms access to cloud providers and strong cybersecurity capabilities to ensure the utmost resilience. 

The flexibility of EVP means a customer can swap in or add/delete services as necessary, and new services can be spun up and tested on the platform before going live. If they made a miscalculation or their plans change – if they need a different SD-WAN or firewall, or they need to disinvest in a particular region – then their digital infrastructure can rapidly be aligned with their new needs. Customers can scale services up or down, or change or add/ remove services as they please.  Evolution Platform therefore serves as an ‘insurance policy’ that protects them against currently unknown future risks and opportunities.

Evolution Platform was designed from its inception with the needs of the customer at its heart and it offers them complete autonomy – the freedom to select the services they want rather than those that are available, to choose the vendors they want to work with, rather than having that choice made on their behalf, to onboard innovative new vendors at the pace of their choosing, and to select how much (or how little) they want to take in-house.  

Evolution Platform’s modular nature gives customers the freedom to choose their preferred or best-in-class vendor from those partners embedded on the platform: customers are not locked in and have a huge amount of flexibility in terms of how they provision those services – they can select their cloud and first/last mile provider, and they can rely on our professional services teams or do everything in-house as resources permit.

Allowing customers to procure and manage network services on their terms was the inspiration behind the creation of Evolution Platform – and the convenience enabled by the frictionless cloud-like experience is one of its defining characteristics. These services are configured via a single API-driven interface – automated self-service via the platform’s portal is the standard way of provisioning these services, and we are planning to create an AI agent that will do this on the customers’ behalf.  

Services are billed by the hour, with real-time visibility on usage, costs, and carbon footprint via a centralized interface: this allows customers to view every element of their solution from a single pane of glass, and the structure and impact of new services can be visualized before deployment. Commercial frameworks are in place to allow customers to consume as much (or as little) of the service as they wish.  

The frictionless service delivery that is the hallmark of convenience gives customers the ability to ‘master the moment’. All the services offered on Evolution Platform benefit from such things as consistency of design, so they can be effectively chained together: if one element of the service is changed, then the orchestration of all of those impacted is automatically managed via the platform.

Evolution Platform assures customers that all these services will work together seamlessly, that we will handle all the chaining, and that this will be industrialized. Customers can also depend on the ability of their users to access their data in a frictionless way, while still controlling performance and costs. Our promise to them is that they can trust the technology because nothing will be on the platform that hasn’t already been tested. So, as customers grapple with the challenges and opportunities created by the merging of three very different worlds, the Evolution Platform offers a compelling path forward. By combining the best of the Telco, Cloud and SI worlds, it delivers a holistic approach that restores control, while enhancing convenience and embracing choice.