IT Connection

What Was All That Back There, Then? Orange Business Announced 14 Offers at its March Summit

May 12, 2026May 12, 2026 by John Marcus, posted in Big Data, Communicate

A man with dark hair and a slight smile, wearing a black jacket, against a light blue background. — John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services

Summary Bullets:

• In March 2026, Orange Business unveiled 14 innovations at its summit, a mix of new products, major upgrades, and strategic repackaging.

• The summit’s offerings position Orange to lead in secure, sovereign enterprise services, driving market differentiation and revenue growth.

Orange Business was not shy about showing its work at its customer summit in Paris this March. The event generated five separate press releases, and included references to “14 breakthrough innovations” in its launch announcement for a collection of “trusted AI, cloud and secure connectivity” offers. If you weren’t paying attention, you may be forgiven for wondering what was all that back there, then?

Did Orange Business really launch 14 new offers? Customer events often include the exhibition and announcement of portfolio revamps which include a blend of net-new products, major version upgrades, bundling changes, and partner integrations. They may also include the highlighting of offers or features that have been around for a while, but perhaps had not been widely promoted yet. To understand what all was announced, we can group the announcements (and the 14 individual offers) into themes that align with Orange Business’ strategy and financial reality, addressing revenue pressures and the shift to higher-value services.

AI Platform Becomes Operable

• The full launch of the Live Intelligence Studio platform allows for the building, deploying, and governing of AI agents, featuring observability and cost controls. It marks Orange’s shift from providing GenAI access to running production-ready AI agents, aligning with market trends and budget allocations.

• Deepfake Detection: This enhancement in AI security ensures safe AI operations by improving existing capabilities to detect and mitigate deepfake threats.

Trust Features in Communications

• Appels de Confiance (Branded Calling): This new enhancement to branded calling adds stronger communication security by verifying caller identity, addressing rising fraud concerns and enhancing trust in enterprise communications.

• Agentic Telephony: An enhancement that introduces AI-augmented contact center capabilities, ensuring that Orange remains relevant in AI-driven workflows by automating and improving customer interactions.

• Intelligent Together: This enhancement integrates communication tools for a seamless user experience, streamlining enterprise communication and collaboration.

Sovereign Alternatives

• Live Collaboration: A new offering hosted on Cloud Avenue SecNum with a European software stack, supporting sovereignty in the EU public sector and providing a strategic alternative to non-European solutions.

• On Demand Cloud Connect with Cloud Avenue: This enhancement facilitates secure and sovereign cloud connectivity, offering enterprises a flexible and compliant cloud integration solution.

• On Demand Cloud Connect with Bleu: An enhancement that supports the sovereignty narrative, reinforcing strategic positioning by providing a secure and compliant cloud connectivity option.

Security Adjacent

• Orange Drone Guardian: A new counter-drone service leveraging Orange’s physical assets, providing a niche solution for airspace security and differentiation for select customers.

• Quantum Defender with PQC SDWAN by Cisco: A new offering that protects against quantum threats, ensuring secure data transmission and helping to position Orange as a leader in next-generation cybersecurity.

• Trusted Customer Edge Computing: This enhancement improves local processing and resilience during network disruptions, promising enterprises a robust solution for maintaining operations.

• Smart Data Bridge: A new solution that facilitates efficient data management and integration, enabling seamless data flow across platforms and enhancing enterprise data strategies.

• Network Connect: An enhancement that provides seamless and secure enterprise connectivity, ensuring reliable and efficient network operations.

• CheckPulse: An enhancement that monitors and ensures the health and performance of critical systems, providing enterprises with a reliable tool for system health management.

The mix of new offerings and enhancements showcased at Orange Business Summit 2026 includes a fair amount of innovation that also aligns with the company’s current strategy and vision of providing secure, sovereign, and intelligent solutions. The introduction of new products like the Live Intelligence Studio and Orange Drone Guardian highlights its commitment to advancements in AI and security, while enhancements to existing solutions such as branded calling and cloud connectivity demonstrate a focus on refining and strengthening its existing portfolio. However, the challenge remains in translating these innovations into tangible market success.

The emphasis on AI operability, communication security, and sovereign alternatives reinforces Orange’s market position, and of course the company hopes that it also opens new avenues for revenue growth. As enterprises increasingly prioritize security, compliance, and operational efficiency, the suite of product and feature innovations highlighted at its customer summit provides a compelling value proposition aligned with today’s market demands (and, importantly, also provides competitive differentiation). Yet it remains to be seen which of the 14 offers will resonate the most, and how many make a mark in customer wallet share and new business.

April Showers Heartache on Developers Using Popular Coding Tools

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data

Close-up portrait of a woman with blonde hair and a warm smile. — C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Anthropic backpedals price hikes following outcry

• GitHub makes controversial move from flat-rate to usage-based billing models

April has a been a controversial and even catastrophic month for developers of popular copilots and agents.

Some enterprise and independent developers felt gut-punched following unorthodox activities including significant price increases and major subscription restructuring. Anthropic removed Claude Code from its standard Pro Plan priced at $20, offering it instead as part of its Max plan for $100 per month. Confronted with serious backlash, it was forced to reverse its decision.

An outcry of developers within the GitHub community expressed feelings of betrayal following a similar move when GitHub announced a shift to Copilot usage-based billings, resulting in significant price hikes among premium models including Claude Opus. The newly rolled out usage-based billing structure replaces flat-rate AI fees, reportedly increasing the fee charged Claude’s heavier users by as much as 900%. GitHub’s reasoning behind the decision is the need to offset its escalating compute costs.

Such half-baked moves by leading providers only serve to throw up roadblocks that hinder adoption, trust, and confidence in a still very young market segment of copilots and agents. Solution providers risk alienating their greatest asset — the developer communities that help explore, uncover vulnerabilities, and eventually validate these largely uncharted technologies. Their voices play a major role in helping sway investment decisions among CXOs who struggle to demystify agentic AI ROI.

Additional news reports in April did little to ease developer unrest. Price hikes hit popular coding tools including Windsurf Pro and Cursor Pro. GitHub announced plans to temporarily pause new signups for Copilot for individuals including students and independent developers.

A particularly disturbing story shared on X social media illustrates every developer’s greatest nightmare. Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS, software services provider, described how a leading AI coding agent running a routine task in its staging environment managed to delete his company’s entire production database including backups—in nine seconds flat. After a couple days, and undoubtedly a few heart-attacks, the issue was resolved and the database restored.

But it bears repeating that this cautionary tale reinforces the need for pro-coders at the helm of mission critical activities and policies to ensure that agentic and broader DevOps guardrails are solidly in place.

Lumen Research Paints a Dark Picture of the Threat Landscape in 2026

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026 by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure

Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

/Summary Bullets:

• As the operator of one of the world’s largest global internet backbones, Lumen has a view into 99% of the public IPv4 addresses; its threat research team Black Lotus Labs monitors 2.3 million threats daily.

• Lumen’s 2026 Defender Threatscape Report underscores the highly organized and effective tactics cybercriminals are using to infiltrate the enterprise by exploiting network and edge vulnerabilities.

Long gone are the days when it was a question of if, not when, an organization would be breached. Most enterprise security practitioners are painfully aware of how successful threat actors have become in evolving their techniques to outwit some of the best defensive tools. But if anything, Lumen’s 2026 Defender Threatscape report, highlights that the real security challenge is only beginning. Leveraging research from its Black Lotus Labs threat intelligence unit including data from investigations, network telemetry, and campaigns between September 2024 and January 2026, Lumen notes that in response to the increasing effectiveness of endpoint detection solutions, cybercriminals have changed their strategies to leverage camouflaged proxies, vulnerable edge devices, and generative AI (GenAI) to set up attacks.

Using its visibility into global Internet activity, Black Lotus Labs found cybercriminals acting in a highly organized fashion by first standing up assets to leverage later in highly sophisticated campaigns. Cybercriminals are leveraging AI to create and propagate malicious infrastructure at breakneck speed. Using automation, bad actors can support campaigns, tightening the time between breach and impact. Frequently, adversaries seek out vulnerable internet-connected edge devices including routers, VPN gateways, and firewalls. These resources ofter privileged access to enterprise assets and typically can supply minimal forensic tracing data.

Organized cybercrime is certainly not new, but Black Lotus Labs observes a significant uptick in nation state and for-profit adversaries building up proxy networks exploiting compromised consumer devices. This allows bad actors to assimilate with legitimate infrastructure, in some cases helping them skirt zero trust and geolocational restrictions.

State-affiliated adversaries often seize criminal infrastructure, known as “stolen staging,” to execute their own campaigns. This can obscure their true identities, making it harder to assign responsibility for attacks.

The 2026 Defender Threatscape report offers up some practical guidance, noting the criticality of having insight into network activity and securing edge devices as critical assets. Organizations need to conduct a comprehensive inventory of all Internet-connected services and interfaces, including legacy resources. Enterprise IT should track unusual authentication efforts and edge configuration changes, even if it appears to come from a “safe” IP address.

Essentially, organizations need to take the concept of preemptive security to another level, instead of looking just for potentially malicious activity they need to apply infrastructure awareness and protection. Security teams need to see proxy networks as potentially dangerous threats, and treat them as such with respect to access. They should also turn the thing threat actors use against them – scale – to their advantage. This requires gaining perspective beyond their enterprise assets into network activity that can show the earliest indicators of an encroaching threat.

RingCentral’s Expanded Partnerships with Cox and Spectrum Position Each for Growth in the Contact Center Space and Beyond

April 21, 2026April 21, 2026 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

RingCentral has expanded its partnerships with Cox Business and Spectrum Business by augmenting existing unified communications offers with contact center capabilities.
Now is an especially opportune time to expand the partnerships as organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections.

RingCentral has recently expanded its partnership with two service providers by supplying contact center capabilities for their portfolios. ‘Cox Business Contact Center with RingCentral’ and ‘Unified Customer Experience (UCX) with RingCentral’ from Spectrum Business both leverage RingCentral’s ‘RingCX’ platform, which is AI-driven and omnichannel capable. Both offers complement existing unified communications (UC) offers brought to market in conjunction with RingCentral based on its ‘RingEX’ platform namely, ‘Cox Business Connect with RingCentral’ and from Spectrum Business, ‘Unified Communications (UC) with RingCentral’. Spectrum Business sweetens the deal by blending in a sales-oriented add-on from RingCentral to its UC offer called AI Conversation Expert (ACE), which transcribes and analyzes sales calls and meetings to help close more opportunities.

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You Can’t Look Away From IT

March 31, 2026March 31, 2026 by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader

S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Agentic AI could have been rolled out more gradually, with actual cybersecurity protection, including data protection, regulatory compliance, and responsibility tracking.

• AI and agentic AI are here to stay, but it’s up to customers to pump the brakes and ensure they don’t implement a technology that leaves them vulnerable to attack in ways that even AI’s creators can’t fully envision.

RSAC 2026 concluded last week, and it was a firestorm of AI and agentic AI announcements, products, services, and marketing. The mood on the show floor was positive, the majority of people crowding around interesting demos and informational sessions. And of course, good booth prizes and tchotchkes. Cybersecurity vendors and service providers paid out for lavish booths and even the smaller booths were mostly cleverly decorated/marketed.

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Akamai Research Shows AI-Powered Attacks are Targeting Undersecured APIs

March 31, 2026March 31, 2026 by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure

Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• APIs are an alluring target for threat actors now with the average number of daily API attacks soaring by 113% versus last year.

• More than 60% of the attacks in 2025 were affiliated with unauthorized workflows and activity that veered from the norm; indicators that are cybercriminals shifted from conventional web breaches to behavior-based incidents.

AI is changing the threat landscape, and it is doing so at lightning speed. Aggressive threat actors are putting the technology to work to expedite endpoint discovery and improve overall efficiencies. This has left enterprises flat-footed, often missing breaches until the real losses are finally discovered.

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A Unified Network for IT and OT Delivers Efficiency and Creates Opportunity for Service Providers

March 31, 2026March 31, 2026 by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, Secure

A professional portrait of a man with short black hair, wearing a dark blazer over a light shirt, standing in front of a blurred glass background. — S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

Businesses are modernizing their IT and digitizing their operations. The case of IT and OT convergence is becoming stronger, and this should extend to the underlying network infrastructure.
Network services providers can capture this opportunity by strengthening their professional services and focus on business outcomes.

Businesses are constantly looking for automation and efficiency to improve their speed of operations while lowering costs. Technology is a key driver. Much attention on digital transformation has been on information technology (IT), in the form of migrating workloads to the cloud for agility, leveraging data analytics for business insights, and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for automation.

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EY Survey Reveals Enterprises are Investing in AI to Repel Adversaries Weaponizing the Very Same Technology

March 30, 2026March 31, 2026 by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure

A professional portrait of a woman with long blonde hair, wearing a black jacket and a light-colored top, smiling against a soft blue background. — Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• Ninety-six percent of the security leaders surveyed see AI as a core element in their cybersecurity strategy that they are already deploying

• However, that same number perceive AI-driven attacks as serious threats to their organization

Cybersecurity is a delicate balancing act, requiring organizations to mount multi-layered defenses without causing the kind of friction that can impede productivity. An effective defense also requires the adequate funding to ensure the appropriate technical and personnel resources are in place to protect enterprise assets. With AI as an active part of the cybersecurity conversation, there are more angles for IT organizations to consider as both a proactive tool and an offensive weapon.

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RingCentral AIR Pro Is a Meaningful Addition to the Company’s Contact Center Portfolio but Suffers from a Foggy Roadmap

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• RingCentral AIR Pro is the latest member of RingCentral’s agentic AI ecosystem.

• The offer keeps RingCentral neck-and-neck with rivals, but the omission of launch details dilutes its appeal to the market.

Today, organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centers have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact center’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centers are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents; from reactive to proactive; from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented; and from generic to deeply personalized.

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GSA’s Latest Private Wireless Market Tracker Notes 5G Acceleration – and Caution

March 25, 2026March 25, 2026 by John Marcus, posted in Internet of Things, Mobilize, Network

John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services.

Summary Bullets:

• GSA customer numbers for Q4 2025 show private 5G network traction continuing, driven by repeatable, vertical-specific use cases in manufacturing, mining, and campuses.

• 2026 momentum hinges on pragmatic LTE-to-5G evolution, spectrum clarity, and ROI-focused rollouts amid supply-chain and macro risks.

The Global mobile Supplier Association (GSA)’s Q4 2025 snapshot on private 4G/5G, published in February 2026, suggests it is a market that remains relevant only to certain enterprise segments, while also being more firmly established. With over 2,000 customers of GSA member companies tracked by year-end 2025, one can infer the increasing normalcy of cellular as an enterprise connectivity platform for operations, safety, and automation. Most organizations have more than one private network deployed, (almost) each of which generated revenues exceeding EUR100,000.

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