Chalapathi Rao, chief executive officer, Orange Business India

Orange Business, a global player that operates in India, has been enabling the digital transformation of enterprises. In an interview with tele.net, Chalapathi Rao, chief executive officer, Orange Business India, talks about the company’s key business and operational highlights, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in revolutionising cybersecurity and future growth plans. Edited excerpts…

What have been the key business and operational highlights for Orange Business during the past year?

In India, Orange Business has been experiencing significant growth in the field of digital transformation for both enterprise and public sector entities. As a trusted partner, we assist our customers in addressing dynamic business objectives through our global expertise in multicloud environments, data centres, collaboration, software-defined everything (SDx), smart cities, customer experience and Industry 4.0 practices.

Over the past year, we have observed substantial growth in the data centre, cloud and cybersecurity domains. The government’s push for digital transformation initiatives, such as smart cities, state data centres and state wide area networks (WANs), has contributed to Orange Business gaining substantial market share.

As a global leader in connectivity, we are witnessing exponential growth in secured connectivity solutions. This growth focuses more on solutions such as secure access service edge (SASE), alongside software-defined solutions such as software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN),  software-defined access (SDA) and software-defined networking (SDN).

How does cloud computing help ensure a future-proof digital infrastructure? What are your latest offerings in this domain?

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, businesses are at the crossroads of building a future-proof digital infrastructure that can adapt to changing market dynamics, respond in a timely manner, scale seamlessly and drive innovation. Cloud computing has emerged as a fundamental enabler in achieving these objectives, offering companies untold benefits such as resilience, competitiveness and productivity.

Globally, our solutions are helping customers not only in securing their infrastructures and networks but also ensuring the continuity of their business activities with premium service-level agreements and high-availability guarantees. Some of our latest technologies and advanced features include AI and machine learning (ML), big data, containers and cloud-native applications that customers can take advantage of to innovate. Across the globe, our cloud solutions are available across 70 data centres in five continents, staffed by 2,400 cloud experts.

Orange Business India understands that cloud computing is pivotal to developing future-proof digital infrastructures, offering unmatched scalability, innovation, flexibility and cost-effectiveness. It allows businesses to adapt swiftly to market dynamics and manage fluctuating demands. Key offerings include AI, ML, big data and cloud-native applications. Diverse deployment options such as hybrid, private or public clouds, along with edge computing, can enhance performance and reduce latency. Robust security measures ensure data integrity. Embracing cloud-native architectures accelerates innovation, enabling businesses to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving technology landscape. We aim to empower businesses to navigate the people, process and technology complexities that come with the cloud and position themselves for sustained success.

“Our ambition is to build simpler and more agile end-to-end value propositions, create data solutions in a multicloud environment, provide protection with end-to-end cybersecurity, and future-proof our customers’ businesses.”

What role is AI playing in revolutionising cybersecurity? How is the company integrating AI into its cybersecurity solutions?

AI is already widely used in cybersecurity by significantly enhancing threat detection and analysis capabilities, thanks to its capability for intelligent behaviour to sense, reason and adapt. AI has largely used ML to analyse vast datasets to identify patterns in data, spot anomalies and mimic human intelligence, allowing for the detection of both known and previously unseen security threats, contributing to a more robust cybersecurity posture.

Orange Cyberdefense, a specialist arm of the Orange Group dedicated to cybersecurity, had released its Security Navigator 2024 – an annual security research report – which painted a broad and complex picture of the world of cybersecurity, amplified by geopolitical, economic and social dimensions. It revealed a total of 129,395 events processed by our Threat Detection teams, of which 25,076 (19 per cent) are confirmed security incidents. Of these, the threat action “hacking” remained the most prominent, accounting for almost a third of the confirmed incidents (30.32 per cent), followed by misuse (16.61 per cent) and malware at third (12.98 per cent).

AI algorithms within Orange Business’ cybersecurity solutions establish baselines for normal user and network behaviour. Deviations from these baselines trigger alerts, enabling rapid response to potential threats. Behavioural analytics powered by AI provide a proactive layer of defence against insider threats and advanced persistent threats. In addition to using ML to analyse World Watch advisories in its Security Navigator 2023 report, designed to provide insights for a proactive security posture, Orange Cyberdefense also used natural language processing, a subset of ML, to automate several aspects of data classification, entity extraction and scale analysis, alongside experts.

In addition, more than just providing value-added support to analysts, AI will increasingly play an important role in incident response. Finally, the leap forward in AI in the field of conversational agents such as ChatGPT would allow for real progress to be made in the field of victim assistance, while intensifying awareness-raising actions.

How will the company’s various partnerships support enterprises’ digitalisation goals?

Orange Business orchestrates collaboration and innovation by engaging a diverse ecosystem of global and local partners, enabling our clients to align with the desired business outcomes. With extensive expertise and a proven track record, Orange Business is well-equipped to drive long-term, sustainable success.

We invest heavily in gaining in-depth expertise of our strategic partners and selectively collaborate with a few preferred ones for each business need, feeding into our key strategic value propositions: digital infrastructure, employee experience, customer experience and operational experience. Our collaboration DNA is to co-develop innovative and unique solutions with them, aiming for best-in-class customer satisfaction and the highest-performance service models. In simple words, the world’s best technology is further enhanced and empowered by Orange.

In addition to building highly reliable solutions, our collaboration with partners brings innovation to our customers for their desired business outcomes. For example, the Evolution Platform, a cloud-like experience to access next-gen connectivity and security solutions with industry-leading original equipment manufacturers. We work proactively and hand-in-hand with our partners to shorten our clients’ time-to-value. We also acknowledge that every customer is unique and Orange will always be flexible on technology choices across our partner portfolio, integrating with new partners and third parties as needed.

Every year, Orange Business challenges itself and its partners to build more trusted, sustainable and data-driven solutions. We are highly demanding, but also happy to recognise great collaboration with our yearly Partner Awards.

“Orange Business has been experiencing significant growth in the field of digital transformation for both enterprise and public sector entities.”

What are your future growth plans and strategies for the Indian market?

Our ambition is to build simpler and more agile end-to-end value propositions, create data solutions in a multicloud environment, provide protection with end-to-end cybersecurity, develop and industrialise our integration services and finally, future-proof our customers’ businesses. While Orange Business India has significant business in smart cities, state data centres, pharma, etc., we have a clear strategy to grow our business focused on services in healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance, and manufacturing, with best-in-class industry solutions leveraging our global experience in these segments.

India is a key market for us and we will lead with our strong integration and service capabilities as we continue to provide our customers with solutions to address.

  • Secured digital infrastructure: Our goal is to combine our business strategy with our customers’ infrastructure strategy to create a platform for successful business outcomes with SDx, SASE solutions.
  • Operational experience: We aim to support our industrial customers in the digital transformation of their operational activities with end-to-end solutions based on system/infrastructure integration capabilities, IT tools at the service of their operational performance, and underlying cybersecurity solutions with internet of things (IoT), private 5G, smart industries and analytics.
  • Customer experience and employee experience: We aim to transform the digital workspace, which includes the equipment that employees work on, the apps and processes they need to do their jobs and the collaborative environment (including the office). We aim to help our clients build a closer relationship with their customers with communications platform as a service (CPaaS), collaboration and CX services.

We will continue to grow cybersecurity, SmartX, multicloud, SDx, CPaaS, CX and IT services, across all domains as part of the digital transformation.