Orange Business Services is a global IT and communications services provider, providing services in 220 countries. Its 20,000 employees support organisations in every aspect of their digital transformation, with services that include cloud computing, customer contact solutions, mobility management, Internet of Things (IoT), security services, high-speed broadband, conferencing and collaborative workspaces.
The heart of Orange Business Services is its connectivity services, which represent a third of its business. As Pierre-Louis Biaggi, Head of the Network Solutions Business Unit, explained: “The mission of Orange Business Services is to be the trusted partner of the digital transformation of our customers, leveraging IT to drive better, more competitive businesses. We know the network can deliver significant value to our customers, but it’s the innovation in the network that really makes exciting things possible — with virtualisation and automation.”
Challenge:
Orange Business Services has always had a close relationship with its customers and in 2013, one of its in-depth surveys found that many were looking for greater agility from their network services. “Our customers are asking for more. Their world is changing and they want more flexibility from their network and from their services. Agility, speed and simplicity are paramount. They want instant access to new customised services and applications,” Biaggi said.
Orange Business Services was serving its customers with traditional MPLS connectivity over a network architecture that was static, so conventional services took a long time to develop and deliver. The company decided to create a new showcase SDN/NFV-based network service, which it called ‘Easy Go Network’. It set itself ambitious objectives and timelines to deliver service offerings from inception to market in less than two years, supporting real customers.
Orange Business Services challenged itself to create a network that offered:
- Improved agility – enabling the dynamic creation of new network services with customers given control of their network policies (quality of service, routing, security)
- Rapid delivery – with automation of the internal processes and a move towards digital solutions, giving more control to the customer
- New innovative network products – enabling customised ‘service chaining’ to allow processing of traffic as it transits the network infrastructure
The services would target SMBs with up to 30 sites.
“For me, really the most important aspect is increased flexibility for our customers. Customers want to be able to choose in a very short time what type of service and what type of functionality they want in one of their sites and that’s what we set out to give them,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi.
Solution:
Orange Business Services knew that its choice of technology partner would be critical if it was going to realise its ambitions. It looked for a partner that had proven open technology, a strong track record in delivering innovative virtualised networks and also one that shared its vision for software-defined networking (SDN). The company already had a long-standing relationship with Juniper Networks, which was a key player in its network infrastructure for both L3 and L2 VPN services. Based on that experience, it selected Juniper Networks as its networking partner for the Easy Go Network platform.
“I think that Juniper’s track record in terms of innovation was key to our partnership and will be key in the future, because continuous innovation should be everyday work,” said Biaggi.
Orange Business Services valued Juniper’s openness and interoperability, leveraging its common Juniper Networks Junos operating system across its platforms. It also recognised that it could use Juniper’s northbound APIs to develop new services with third parties, which could provide a rich set of virtualised network functions (VNFs) and it looked to Juniper to supply its own virtualised security functions.
Orange Business Services used Juniper Networks’ MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers to create the physical switching layer, or NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), in its Easy Go Network. Juniper Networks Contrail provided the open SDN controller solution and Juniper Networks vSRX virtual firewalls delivered security services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The vSRX virtual firewalls deliver core firewall, robust networking, advanced security services and automated lifecycle management capabilities within a virtual machine. By using Juniper’s virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) solution, Orange Business Services has also been able to orchestrate more value-added services inside the network.
The new Easy Go Network offering has already been made commercially available in a live network and allows Orange Business Services customers to set up and manage their own IP VPNs as well as their firewalls, Web Content Filtering and other services through a self-care portal. Other key elements of the Easy Go Network are plug-and-play customer equipment and automated infrastructure management.
As Pierre-Louis Biaggi explained: “We are already offering a full set of services including firewalling, load balancing and Web Content Filtering in a virtualised mode. Any customer can order this service in a few clicks and have it delivered automatically and quickly. Most importantly, the entire solution has been built using open protocols, allowing multiple vendors to add functionality and value to the network.”
Result:
Customers can now turn on new services in minutes, or reconfigure them just as quickly, enabling a new level of business agility with services provisioned via a self-serve portal. The new network platform has also vastly reduced time-to-market for new services.
“Automation is obviously one of the major benefits of SDN and NFV,” Biaggi said. “Of course it helps us lower our costs but I think the real advantage is that it reduces the time it takes us to deliver services to our customers. This means service delivery in minutes instead of days or months. It is our customers that will benefit most.”
Orange Business Services sees Easy Go Network as a real-life proof point of SDN and NFV technology deployed in its network. It also allows it to better target the SMB market, where customers do not usually adopt MPLS-based solutions.
“Juniper has really listened to our requirements and worked alongside us to create a new business and service model. Now we have new growth opportunities in two areas — primarily the SMB market in France, but also an expanded international market,” Biaggi said.
Next steps:
Orange Business Services puts part of its success down to collaboration across internal IT and networking teams to create a more DevOps-oriented culture in line with the potential that software-driven networks and automation can deliver. Alongside this was the importance of selecting a technology partner that would also work together in an open and collaborative way. As Biaggi explained: “We know we can count on Juniper to deliver, they bring us the best knowledge – both in terms of technology but also in terms of a new business model approach for SDN and NFV.”
Orange Business Services now plans to move to a broader commercial rollout of its Easy Go Network platform, developing new commercial products to enhance its portfolio. The company also sees this as an opportunity to undergo a complete digital transformation of its own business. It is the first step towards developing a portfolio of services that are all digitised, all online, all flexible and all accessible and self-managed by its customers.
“I think that we are ahead of the game. Today, with the help of Juniper, we have implemented a real proof-of-concept in our live network with real customers and services,” Pierre-Louis Biaggi said. “This is a great achievement but I think that the biggest change is still in front of us. NFV technology will enable our services to evolve even further. It will bring us the capability to offer new services to our customers in a very agile and flexible way and the capability to bring up new functionalities on our network very quickly, coming from multiple partners.”
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