Vivek, our new CEO introduces us to the Orange strategy in the Americas and the rest of the world at Orange Business Live 2010. Here is my transcription of his speech:

The way we see the market: what we are hearing from our broad range of customers is that they are cautiously optimistic. Costs still matter but things are happening and have happened in the past 2 years which are changing the landscape. New interactions with customers and new employee relationships are C-level issues. VPs in charge of HR are getting feedback about the way that IT is or not working and this is becoming a real hiring and motivation issue which CIOs have to fix.

Vivek sees his job as a way of helping his clients face these issues.

New trends discussed by Vivek in his speech and driving our strategy are the following:

• telepresence and the increasing influence of video on business
• applications that go mobile
• Greeny IT
• Gen Y
• Collaboration and social networks
• World trade boucing back

All the above are exciting new trends, Vivek says, on which Orange Business Services can be helping its clients with.

What customers told us in the past few months:

• we are valued as a network services provider (even though we do IT, network services remain at the core of our business)
• supporting clients the world over is a differentiation factor in the eyes of our clients
• a customer-driven culture is also a strong differentiation factor
• more empowerment at the front line will be granted to ensure better and faster action on customer requests to maximize satisfaction.

Who we are:

• 3,700 customers
• 20,500 employees worldwide
• the world's largest seamless voice and data network
• 323,000+ IPVPN access points in 172 countries

If compared to our competition, the benchmarks show more consistency and the transformation implemented in our delivery model and our consistency in our go-to-market model is a strong differentiator too. This core belief that we are working in the long term is what is at the heart of what we do and Vivek commits on pursuing this line of thouhght in the future on behalf of our clients.

What do we want to be?

Connectivity is our core activity and what we build everything else on. "We believe that IT infrastructure is a natural extension of our network business". we know how to manage equipments remotely and how to deploy and operate that kind of services. We are also making room in our strategy for 3 main verticals: health, transport and finance. Customer contact is also another vertical on which we are focusing. We can bring value to the market in that area too.

Yet, we do not believe that we can be everything to everyone! and we do not want to be competing in all areas.

Main projects on which we are currently working: workplace of the future, m2m and Internet of things, video, mobile MNC management (already tackled by Jeroen this morning), very high bandwidth (because of all the needs generated by video and the new kinds of multimedia applications), end user CRM and security.

how will we achieve this ambition?

Our answer is customers. Our constant focus on loyalty index - something which was started by Vivek's predecessor Barbara Dalibard - is a major asset and a number one priority and will continue to be so. The customer experience is important too, and the acceleration of the ability to respond to customer requests.

North America

Why are we in the US? One of the things that we bring is at Orange Business Services is the ability to go global and focus on that kind of value. We are not into providing connectivity to all the retail shops of a local provider but we have undeniable value for those US businesses which want to go global. "We don't want to spread ourselves too thin, but what we do we do well" added Vivek Badrinath.

We therefore have a sweet spot: medium size companies with a global presence. We bring value to companies which want to have a global presence and we manage this complexity on behalf of our customers. The only three countries we are not serving are North Korea, Greenland and Afghanistan.

Rest of the World

Africa is an area in which the France Telecom group has invested very much (undersee cables, bringing Internet connection to these regions). This is one of our areas of strength.The Middle East is also an exciting target for Orange Business Services with many "smart and connected cities" projects in these geographies. India: we are continuing on focusing on our ability to deliver more broadly in India. The Indian economy is obviously interesting due to its staggering growth.In China, we are expanding and serving more cities in this large country. Our strong presence in Singapore is also a strong point. We already have a strong presence in Russia, this is a strong asset of ours too.

Vivek concluded his speech with the flexible for business alliance: this is a partnership between Cisco, EMC, VMWare and Orange Business Services on cloud computing and ensuring that we deliver best of breed cloud computing solutions with these 3 fine partners.