Today we had the opportunity to hear Vivek Badrinath, CEO of Orange Business Services. Vivek has been in the job for 70 years, 25 years in the IT and Telecom business, 10 years at Orange. paid a tribute to his predecessor, Barbara Dalibard. In the course of his presentation, he reminded us of a few facts and figures about Orange Business Services: €7.5 bn revenue in 2009, 20,500 employees worldwide, 10,000 in France, 3,700 customers, the world's largest seamless voice and data network, 323,000 IPVPN access points in 172 countries, part of a large group with close to 200m customers worldwide. More importantly, he reviewed the main trends in telecoms and IT for the coming years and how Orange Business Services will address these issues on behalf of its customers. He also stressed in detail how Orange would develop, region by region, and highlighted the main areas of focus for the operator in terms of new services. new market trends, and where Orange Business wants to be

• economic recovery: cautiously optimistic, there will be some recovery and there is still pressure on the prices. But the world is not what it was 2 years ago. Beyond the financial crisis, some things have happened which force us to change the way we conduct our projects. there is a new paradigm: smartphones, unified communications, the rise of social all this implies that IT has to evolve both with regard to the service it delivers to clients and employees. As a result, IT is once more at the centre of strategy, which wasn't the case a few years ago. Smartphones, interaction and mobility are all of a much more richer nature now.
• exciting new trends that shape our world:
  • seeing is believing: video and person to person communications. the emergence of video on phones, 3G video phoning resurgence and mobility are all vectors of that new change
  • mobile apps
  • Green IT and IT for Green both becoming real trends which are now part of the business
  • Generation Y comes to work: Email is what telex was to us, they don't see the difference between professional and personal, they do blogging and they are multitasking all the time
  • collabotation and social networks are high on the agenda
• how Orange Business Services addresses these trends?
  • offer second to none core network services which underline all these trends
  • not compromising with trust and delivery
  • be customer-focused (a trend which started before under Dalibard's management and is even strengthened now)
  • act at both global and local levels
  • improve fastness of action to support clients who need to merge and evolve their business at the speed of light$
  • outstanding customer experience is at the heart of what Orange Business Services wants to deliver, despite the commoditization of telecoms
• ambition for Orange Business Services
  • Stephane Richard, new CEO of the France Telecom group emphasized the commitment of the group towards innovation, research and development and the development of new services. He also laid the stress on the fact that B2B is at the heart of innovation, quoting new mobile applications and cloud computing as being areas in which B2B is leading the pack and showing the way for innovation within the overall market and the group in particular
  • Orange Business is aiming at being "the leading global integrator of communications solutions and services, providing outstanding customer experience" (meaning our clients and their internal customers).
  • Orange ambitions for B2B worldwide, region by region:
    • in Europe, strengthen leadership and presence
    • in Noth America, deliver global value to global focused American players
    • in Latin America, we see some level of economic recovery, the ambition for Orange is to help clients boost their activities
    • in Africa, continue to invest in that region and becoming the "partner of choice" in that continent. In Egypt, we have our largest customer centre
    • in the Middle-East, a lot of things are happening. We bring loads of expertise in building smart cities and the intelligence we invest in new urban design
    • in India, a lot of investment was made in our customer centres. it's part of our delivery chain and that investment will be strengthened
    • in China, Orange Business links will ne strengthened, our presence developed and local partnerships as well as direct investments will be strengthened
    • in Asia Pacific and in Russia, Orange is committed to help MNC's boost their activities in these fast developing regions
  • future areas of focus for the global operator: voice and conferencing, video, workspace of the future, Internet of things, mobile MNC management, end user CRM and security