Enterprise, especially multi-national enterprises, are treading water in an increasingly complex world of services, applications and deployment cycles, which means their infrastructures are also becoming more complicated. That complexity can decrease user experience, increase costs, hamper overall performance and efficiency, and lead to dissatisfaction by an enterprise's end users.
In order to ease the pain points, service providers, such as Orange Business Services, are offering Multisource Service Integration (MSI), which is also known as Service Integration and Management (SIAM), services to their business customers. According to research by Gartner, 50% of large enterprises will require a MSI approach for their vendor management by 2022, up from 10% last year.
Orange Business Services has several key components in its MSI portfolio, including its experience managing contracts with more than 200 internet service providers across its global footprint in over 200 countries, according to Samir El Rashidy, director of enterprise services at Orange Business Services.
Integrating multiple services into enterprises' technology and business processes is not only complex, it's also a drain on company resources. The average number of service providers a company deals with for their SD-WAN, LAN, mobile or voice networks have tripled in recent years, according to El Rashidy.
Enterprises are also managing more assets across local branches that are spread across multiple regions, and there are also compliance issues that vary from one country to the next. All of which, or even part of which, can be handled by Orange Business Services' MSI business.
"Our goal, our long term vision, is to build a solution or managed platform that can be scaled by using the same processes and same solutions to integrate SD-WAN, WAN, LAN, mobile and other services," El Rashidy said. "We want to offer our customers flexibility and agility as they deploy these new services."
While Orange Business Services competes with other service providers such as BT, AT&T, Verizon and system integrators in the MSI sector, El Rashidy said one of the benefits of working with Orange is that it "sits in the middle" as both a service provider and a company that manages other service provider contracts for customers that are deploying SD-WAN, for example. Orange has also deployed most of the services and applications that it now offers to its business customers.
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Two prime examples of Orange Business Services' MSI abilities are its recent work with Sony Group and Siemens. Orange Business Services is connecting more than 500 Sony locations in over 50 countries across five continents with its Orange Flexible SD-WAN solution, which launched last year using Cisco's Viptela SD-WAN technologies. In March, Orange Business Services announced it would deploy Flexible SD-WAN across 1,500 Siemens sites.
El Rashidy said Orange Business can manage the entire scope of an enterprise's network—from pre-sales to benchmarking to contracts to trouble tickets, just one area of the network, or set up a business with what it needs and then walk away. For example, Orange Business Service could manage the overlay of a network while a large enterprise may prefer to manage the underlay.
El Rashidy also cited Orange Business Services' close relationships with OEMs and vendors such as Cisco in order to help integrate hardware and software into a business customer's network.
SD-WAN, network function virtualization (NFV) and moving workloads and the applications to the cloud are also drivers in the MSI sector. El Rashidy said that while "softwarization" can make network operations easier, there's still a large dependency on how the network pieces are being managed or operated.
"I think the key message is we are growing in this field to be the integrator of choice to manage IT," El Rashidy said. "We have a proven track record to help them transform. And then lastly, and not least, we have a lot of innovation with our ability to bring AI, operational event correlation and other services that have a lot of traction to businesses."