2025 Operator Keynote: Orange Network Softwarisation - On the Path to Strategic Independence
Resilience Becomes the Central Strategic Priority The keynote opened with a clear message: resilience has become the defining strategic imperative for telecom operators. As connectivity now underpins transportation, payments, public services and national security, disruptions—whether technical, cyber‑related or geopolitical—carry far‑reaching consequences. In this environment, resilience is no longer a technical attribute but a foundational requirement for economic and societal stability.
A Rapidly Escalating Risk Environment
Trabbia highlighted how the traditional telco approach to resilience, built on redundancy and route diversity, no longer covers the full spectrum of threats. Cyber risk has intensified dramatically, with attacks becoming more sophisticated, persistent and commercially accessible. Incidents targeting major operators and critical infrastructure illustrate the scale of exposure. Geopolitical volatility adds further complexity, introducing risks linked to sanctions, supply chain disruption and political leverage. The message was unequivocal: operators must reduce strategic dependencies, as reliance on dominant external players creates unacceptable vulnerabilities.
Softwarisation as the Path to Strategic Independence
A major theme of the keynote was the need for a fundamental shift in the telco industrial model. While maintaining control over physical assets, such as subsea cables and repair capabilities remains essential, physical infrastructure alone cannot deliver next‑generation resilience. The transition to network softwarisation, supported by cloud‑native architectures and open‑source ecosystems, is central to Orange’s strategy. The company is rebuilding its internal “make” capability, developing its own switches, routers, telco cloud functions and a cloud‑based core network deployable globally within hours. This approach is not about isolationism, but about ensuring flexibility, independence and long‑term resilience through open collaboration.
Reinventing the Operating Model and Telco Culture
Trabbia focused on the organisational transformation required to support this new model. He emphasised that the challenge is not technology, expertise or funding, instead, the shift demands a rethinking of telco DNA: architecture principles, value chains, skills and operational culture. Legacy KPIs must evolve to reflect cloud‑native expectations, including time to detect failures, time to recover, lead time to production and change‑failure rates. Achieving this requires widespread adoption of CI/CD practices, automation and AI‑driven operations. Reskilling is central to this effort, with teams being trained to blend traditional telco expertise with cloud‑native capabilities.
Data Centres and Sovereign Cloud as Strategic Enablers
Also addressed was the growing importance of data centres in supporting AI infrastructure and digital sovereignty. Europe’s data centre footprint lags behind the US, and significant expansion will be required to support AI model training, inference and real‑time services. Orange is investing in trusted, sovereign cloud environments—such as its involvement in the Blue sovereign cloud initiative—to meet rising demand for secure, locally governed infrastructure. These capabilities are increasingly essential for enterprises that cannot rely on public cloud services without strong guarantees around data protection and extraterritoriality.
A Collective Industry Effort Toward Future Resilience
The keynote concluded with a call for industry‑wide collaboration. Softwareisation, open standards, shared best practices and co‑investment in infrastructure are essential to achieving the next level of resilience. Strategic independence cannot be achieved in isolation; it requires a coordinated effort across the telecom ecosystem.