Cisco trumpets Orange orchestration win

Orange has decided to deploy some Cisco orchestration tech and Cisco wants you to know all about it.

The announcement was made at the Cisco Live corporate fest in Barcelona, presumably intended as a dress rehearsal for Mobile World Congress later this month. ‘Join us in Barcelona to transform your outlook, your career, and your potential with 5 days of education, networking, and fun!’ says the #CLEUR landing page. What’s not to like?

Luckily for those of us unable to attend Cisco is sharing some of the top news to come from the event with the telecoms trade press and so far this seems to be the biggie. Orange, being the forward-thinking operator it is, realised it needed to get with the programmability if it’s going to stay ahead of the game in the 5G era, which is where Cisco comes in.

‘Orange knew they could reduce CapEx and OpEx by implementing new architectures on platforms ready for mass-scale networking, and automating a large number of tasks and operations,’ explains the release. Luckily Cisco had just the ticket, in the form of its Network Services Orchestrator software platform, which Orange wasted no time in snapping up.

“Cisco’s model-driven approach to network automation and service orchestration is enabling Orange to drastically speed up the delivery of services across our entire lifecycles,” said Christian Gacon, VP of Wireline Networks and Infrastructure at Orange. “This global deployment of Cisco NSO also provides us with uniform configuration management tools and consumable network APIs for business applications and customer self-service portals.”

“Visionary service providers like Orange recognize the value network automation and SDN offer to drive innovation in their markets,” said Yves Padrines, VP of Global Service Provider EMEAR at Cisco. “Cisco’s network automation software and product portfolio enables carriers to simplify their operations through sophisticated data analysis and proactive control to help them continue to deliver superior customer experiences without interruption.”

It’s intriguing to see Cisco looking to make a big noise about an operator deal win, in Barcelona of all places, since it had seemed to be deprioritizing CSPs in favour of enterprise IT customers. Could this be the precursor to a larger than expected presence from Cisco at MWC and a sign that the pendulum may be swinging back again? We’ll find out soon enough.