In its previous guise as Equant, Orange Business Services had a longstanding relationship with SITA, from which the global network operator was spun out in 1995, before being acquired by France Telecom SA in 2001. In May Equant was renamed as part of Orange, which is now the French group’s global brand for mobile and broadband consumer and business customers.
The expansion of the deal with SITA, which is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, means adding services on customers’ local and Metro area networks (LAN and MAN) as well as the partners’ traditional activity of WAN provision, and will take them into areas such as mobility and IP telephony, as well as integration with CRM and machine-to-machine comms, said Stephane Rougeot, exec VP of sales and marketing for indirect channels at Paris-based Orange Business Services.
This will represent a move up the food chain for the partners and bring them into competition with players with whom they have largely collaborated as subcontractors, such as IBM and EDS, said Rene Azoulai, senior VP of business development for SITA. Both partners are aware that there will still be accounts in which they will work under the leaderships of one of the big IT outsourcers. Those will be the exceptions rather than the rule, said Azoulai, we may also go in and replace the existing comms subcontractor. He declined to go into details, but sector sources say SITA and the then Equant jointly ousted AT&T as comms providers to Finnair last year on a contract where the prime was CSC.
The expansion of the partnership also envisages a need to integrate with existing in-country providers of voice and data comms so as to make the partners’ offering more competitive, particularly as any engagement on the customers’ LAN will require integration with a domestic WAN provider.
Though specific to the air traffic industry, the agreement is clearly a significant one for Orange Business Services. Rougeot said it is part of the group’s drive to meet the 800m euros ($1bn) annual revenue target from outsourcing by the year 2008 set by France telecom as part of its NExT strategic goals program last year. He also pointed out that SITA is currently Business Services’ largest single customer. SITA actually shared Equant’s network until 2001, when it signed a 10-year service agreement to run its traffic over the network purely as a customer.
