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

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.

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

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

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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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8×8’s New Customer Experience Capabilities are Contemporary but Confusing

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G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8’s latest capabilities reflect an ongoing pivot from collaboration occupying its core to customer experience (CX) assuming its central identity.

• While 8×8 is generating market momentum with the new capabilities, the offer structure is confusing.

A few years ago, 8×8 undertook a fundamental pivot, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with CX making up its central identity. Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities – is now known as the 8×8 Platform for CX.

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Zoom’s New Agentic AI Capabilities Fuel a Rejuvenation of Its Platform and the Company

Close-up portrait of a smiling man with glasses, wearing a suit.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • Zoom introduced capabilities that reflect a trend of AI moving from use in silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale.
  • In addition, Zoom’s new capabilities extend a dramatic transformation that has been taking place at the company over recent years.

Zoom introduced a wide host of features that meaningfully expand its agentic AI platform. The enhancements span Zoom Workplace, Zoom Phone, and Zoom CX. At the heart lies workflow automation embedded into meetings, calls, chat, and contact center interactions so that conversations trigger action across an enterprise’s systems.

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The Middle East Conflict – The Impact on the ASEAN ICT Market

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A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• Within the ASEAN enterprise ICT market, the conflict has no direct impact, but indirect effects are becoming increasingly apparent due to the higher crude oil prices and rising electricity costs.

• The industry can expect lower ICT spending, higher operational costs for telcos, and slower AI momentum.

The conflict in the Middle East has entered its third week and is expected to continue for several more weeks. Its impact can already be seen globally across multiple sectors, as discussed in detail in GlobalData’s The Middle East Conflict – Executive Briefing, March 10, 2026.

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The AI Boom and Unintended Consequences

S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Service providers, tech companies, and enterprises are under extraordinary pressure to develop and deploy AI solutions.

• Enterprises will need to re-evaluate their goals for the rest of the year, considering cost increases and possible delivery delays.

In the late 1930s, Sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote about unintended consequences, where some of the outcomes of purposeful action are not predicted or intentional. He proposed three types of unintended consequences – unexpected benefit, unexpected drawback, and perverse result. In the first, there is a positive benefit, something good happened that wasn’t foreseen. In the second, an unforeseen detriment occurs. In the third, the result makes the problem worse, a contrarian result.

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Ooredoo Carves Out Fiber and Subsea Unit to Accelerate Regional Connectivity Ambitions

B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

• Ooredoo Group launches Ooredoo Fibre Networks, an independent entity dedicated to managing and scaling Ooredoo’s international connectivity and submarine cable infrastructure ambitions.

• By establishing a new entity, Ooredoo can be financially independent from its domestic operations, enabling it to be more transparent to present and future investors.

As global bandwidth demand surges and AI-driven cloud expansion continues to reshape traditional global traffic corridors, Ooredoo’s decision to establish a standalone business dedicated to international subsea cable and terrestrial fiber connectivity signals a shift in strategic intent. Rather than simply expanding capacity, the carrier appears to be reorganizing its infrastructure to compete more assertively in the wholesale and transit arena, where scale, route diversity, and commercial agility increasingly define market leadership. In a region that is fast-emerging as a key route, is Ooredoo positioning itself to evolve from a multi-national connectivity provider into the Middle East’s regional connectivity powerhouse?

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Sparkle and VDPC Redefine Infrastructure Partnership; Barracuda Swims Between Italy and Spain

B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

• Sparkle has teamed up with VDPC and private equity firm Teset Capital will build the Barracuda Subsea Cable, a high-capacity subsea cable connecting Spain to Italy.

• Sparkle will acquire the Valencia-Genoa infrastructure and Valencia co-location, boosting its connectivity across the Iberian Peninsula.

In today’s interconnected world, subsea cables are the unseen arteries that power global communications with underwater cables carrying approximately 99% of the world’s internet traffic across continents. As operators collaborate to expand their network infrastructure, the recent announcement between wholesale network provider, Sparkle and Spanish telecommunications provider, Valencia Digital Port Connect (VDPC) highlights how strategic collaborations between infrastructure players continue to shape the future of digital connectivity. But as ownership of Sparkle is about to change, could this influence its long-term role in global infrastructure?

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Slack Has Landed a Starring Role at Salesforce

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Slack has been given a new lease on life from its parent Salesforce, serving as a frontend for the platform.

• It is not yet time to include Slack in the discussion along with rivals, but the company merits keeping a close eye on.

When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28 billion, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. After all, Slack was a second-tier player in the team collaboration space while Salesforce was a premier provider of customer resource management (CRM) technology and a captain of industry at large. Surely, the acquisition would follow the familiar pattern of so many, which preceded it with a ‘big fish’ gobbling up a ‘little fish’ never to be heard from again. For certain, Slack would be stripped of its brand name, and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforce’s massive stockpile. Well, quite the opposite happened. Slack has not only survived – it has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

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