Pierre-Louis de Guillebon, CEO of Orange International Carriers: Voice transformation, security and innovation

Pierre-Louis de Guillebon, CEO of Orange International Carriers: Voice transformation, security and innovation

CEO Pierre-Louis de Guillebon talks to Jason McGee-Abe about Orange International Carriers’ voice transformation and the challenge of adapting to innovation.

What have been the highlights and key regional developments for Orange International Carriers in the past year?

We have successfully continued to develop the revenues and margins of our voice business and we’re very proud of this achievement. We’re one of the top three players by revenue. We have been switching our voice service to voice-over-IP (VoIP), deploying new VoIP systems, and today we are half way there, already transforming 50% from traditional voice to VoIP.

Our Tier-1 open international transit IP network is starting to directly connect with content providers and improving the quality of traffic for our retail operations in Spain, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and other countries in Europe. 

What are the main challenges of operating in the European market and how are you looking to tackle those challenges over the next period?

There are many challenges, but for me a key one is changing and adapting to innovation.

We’re constantly faced with innovation and preparing for the next big thing, such as voice-over-LTE (VoLTE). IP traffic increases two-fold every year and, as I said in my roundtable discussion on Day One of Capacity Europe, we face huge security issues. The threat is in front of us and hackers are ready to attack. Payments on internet terminals is another challenge. As the internet of things (IoT) explodes we’ll have billions of connected objects and our challenge is preparing for all these new types of innovation that will come to the market very quickly.

What are your strategic priorities as well as expansion plans for the region in 2017?

My main priority, and it is very important, is to better handle security, not just reacting to attacks but to be more proactive and expanding our network and delivery of content closer to our customers.

To continue to develop switching from a transit network to a content delivery network (CDN) and deploying a network of CDNs, pushing content closer to our customers, aiding them with the explosion of traffic and their latency battles, typically stemming from video and gaming. 80-90% of content is video and future innovation will lead to 4K and 8K video and millions of virtual realtiy headsets will add more traffic and pressure to enhance bandwidth. 

What does your organisation hope to achieve by attending Capacity Europe 2016?

We’re very happy that Capacity Europe is in Paris and it’s a good time to catch up between the ITW events in Chicago. For us, the two big advantages of this event though is networking and sharing industry knowledge. It’s always good to not be alone in the world and to share views with peers and Capacity Europe is a place where you meet all your customers, partners, and contacts over three days and share industry views, challenges and lessons learnt.

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