Barbara Dalibard is the president and CEO of Orange
Business Services. Prior to its rebranding, Dalibard was president and CEO of
Equant. She remains France Telecom Groups executive vice president in charge of
the enterprise communication services division. Previously, Dalibard served as
the executive vice president of the corporate solutions division from January
2003 until March 2004.
Returning to France Telecom from Alcanet, she became the
director, business markets, Orange France; and vice president of Orange Business
Services in 2001. Dalibard is ranked fifth on the list of Fortune 50 most
powerful women in business 2009. Excerpts from an exclusive interaction with
Dataquest
What differentiates Orange Business Services?
One of the main differentiators is that we have global reach. We are
everywhere in the world. The only place where we do not have presence is
Afghanistan. The second differentiator is our business model. We have adopted
regional capabilities with global model. The third differentiator is our
innovation. We really want to be ahead of others. We have invested in 4,000 labs
globally for this purpose.
How is your strategy of expanding into emerging markets
paying off?
Yes, our business is doing well in Africa and Asia Pacific regions. In fact,
in some of these markets we are having double-digit growth. Recently, we have
even received license to provide Internet services in India. We are shortly
launching this initiative for our enterprise customers. We are making
investments in the emerging markets, as these are our growing markets.
How is your experiment in Africa on PC on Orange
platform doing? Are you planning to replicate this in any other country?
Orange is exploring ways of offering new servicesincluding low cost
personal computersto the small and medium business markets in Africa. To keep
costs down, the PCs would act as network computers with data stored centrally,
and that would also help to reduce energy consumption. This is doing well. Along
with this, we are looking at offering a couple of other initiatives like cloud
and virtualization. We are taking these two to twenty-eight other countries as
well.
Virtualization of IT was your latest buzzword. What
is the progress on this? Also, what are your plans for cloud computing?
Virtualization of IT is something that Orange is applying in all parts of
the world where it operates. This is part of our cloud computing initiative. We
are offering complete cloud computing servicesfrom infrastructure to real-time
business applications.
We have already rolled out successful cloud services such
as desktop virtualization, and hosted virtualized infrastructure. We are looking
at launching a dozen other services in the next twenty-four months.
When IPv6 becomes a reality, there will be so many
addresses. How are you going to manage such a vast variety of IPs?
Yes, IPv6 will offer lots of IPs. There is a significant focus on
machine-to-machine services. The aim is to make sure we can connect objects on
the network using security-certified IPv6. Enterprises are always looking out to
gain efficiencies in their business models, and increase their competitiveness.
Location tracking, diagnostics and remote maintenanceby communicating with
equipment in the field such as truck fleets, electricity meters, or medical
devicesare very promising. We are looking at offering more M2M services.
How is unified communications changing?
Unified communications is a hot topic, as companies look to manage the
complexity of multiple devices and communication channels more effectively.
Unified communications is a progression from converged
communications that put voice, video, and data on a single network, now moving
to essentially supporting the modern working and communication practices in
businesses.
Srinivas R/CMN
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
The author was hosted by Orange in Paris