Orange Business Services is in the process of helping Mondelēz International move its communications infrastructure to Microsoft Teams. In the process Mondelēz will completely shut off its existing private branch exchange (PBX) networks that allow its employees to talk to each other.
Mondelēz is a global snack-food company with familiar brands such as Cadbury, Oreo, Ritz and Chips Ahoy! The company has about 80,000 employees in approximately 80 countries.
Orange Business Services will manage the Microsoft Teams platform across all Mondelēz offices, factories, warehouses and contact centers. The entire physical footprint and home-based employees of Mondelēz’s worldwide operations will be fully connected via the Teams virtual workspace.
Bad news for legacy PBX operators
Sam Nchinda, VP of Solutions for Orange Business Services, said, “The benefits of moving to cloud are just overwhelming across the board. With cloud-based it’s really easier to set up the whole of your enterprise. He also touted “the cost savings of ditching all these PBXs.”
Lenny Krol, director of Enriched Interactions and Collaboration for the Americas at Orange Business Services, said, “At this point the internet is the standard way of communicating.” He said the Teams solution “abstracts the underlying transport” so that it can run over any connectivity, such as MPLS connections, which a lot of enterprises still have. Or it can run on a wireless connection such as LTE or 5G.
Krol said that Orange will also use its “voice assets” — such as its SIP network — to allow Mondelēz employees to make external phone calls using their Teams client.
But Orange will assist Mondelēz in eliminating all its legacy PBX systems, which involves decommissioning legacy provider systems in 80 countries with more than 100 different PBX providers.
In countries that won’t allow Orange to use its own SIP network — such as China and Russia — Orange will use a workaround device to connect to the local public switched telephone network (PSTN). “But all the PBXs are going to go,” said Nchinda.
How does Orange make money?
Although Microsoft is providing the collaboration platform, there’s still a heavy lift to convert an enterprise’s legacy environment to a cloud environment and then manage that moving forward. Nchinda said, “We manage the complexity for the customer. We’re one of the few organizations in the world that have that unique combination of being an integrator and also having the network-native assets, the voice assets, and skills in all those countries to deliver on a global scale.”
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“The majority of our customers are moving to the cloud for their telephony needs and contact center needs,” said Krol. “In the last two years we’ve seen tremendous growth in multi-nationals moving to the cloud.”
Orange started taking over the management of Mondelēz’s communications in December 2021 and plans to complete the migrations by the end of 2022.