Orange Business Insights 2025: A Telco’s Digital Dream Collides with the Reality of Hyperscalers, Computing Giants & Neocloud Providers

In June 2025, Orange Business hosted its flagship analyst event, Insights 2025, in Paris, offering a timely and forward-looking view into the company’s transformation journey. As Orange Business continues evolving from a connectivity provider to a trusted digital services integrator, the event underscored both the breadth of its ambition and the depth of its engagement with the enterprise market.

Across 2 days of interactive sessions, demonstrations, and executive briefings, Orange shared strategic developments spanning sovereign cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data integration, cybersecurity and digital identity, Graphics Processing Unit-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), and industrial digital transformation. The diversity of topics reflected the wide range of domains in which Orange is actively building capabilities, as it aims to position itself at the intersection of network, cloud, and business outcomes. While connectivity was often mentioned as a key differentiator, particularly in contrast to hyperscale and neocloud competitors, it noticeably took a backseat to discussions around cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and AI-driven services, signaling a clear intent to reposition the brand around higher-value digital services.

The success of this directional change is already showing in Orange’s financials. In 2024, Orange Business reported €7.78 billion in revenue, with Information Technology (IT) & integration services growing by 2.7% (+€102 million) and Orange Cyberdefense up by 11.2% (+€120 million). Digital, data, and AI services delivered around 7% growth, with further upside expected as Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) offerings scale.

While these are certainly promising early results, the point in case shows the dilemma that carriers (and carrier-backed System Integrator (SI) arms) find themselves in to prove their relevance in today’s economy. Providing connectivity is not enough, so they are trying to branch out and take advantage of recent momentum around data sovereignty, cloud computing, and AI. The challenge lies in doing so without simply replicating what others already offer or, even worse, entering head-on battles with hyperscalers and tech giants whose scale, speed, and ecosystem control leave little room for slow or unfocused challengers.

The ongoing transition of Orange Business (reinforced by messages at Insights 2025) must be assessed in the broader industry context, as competing SI arms of European Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are on a similar trajectory.

Orange Business has placed the cloud at the heart of its transformation journey, with platforms like Cloud Avenue demonstrating a strong commitment to sovereign, secure, and standards-compliant infrastructure. The certification under SecNumCloud and BSI C5 reflects Orange’s alignment with European data sovereignty priorities, providing a solid foundation for serving regulated industries. Emerging initiatives such as GPUaaS and sovereign AI services signal the company’s ambition to expand its value proposition beyond infrastructure into high-performance compute and trusted AI. Orange’s cloud strategy is still in a phase of active development—marked by ongoing ecosystem definition, internal alignment efforts, and evolving go-to-market clarity.

Telefónica Tech, in contrast, is embracing the cloud, data, and AI domains through multiple targeted acquisitions. In 2021, the company acquired automation vendor Geprom and Altostratus Cloud Consulting, followed by Microsoft Dynamics cloud specialist BE-terna and Incremental Group (for data analytics) in 2022 and Anjana Data in 2025. While the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy have been discussed at length in a separate ABI Insight (“Telefónica Tech’s 2024 Analyst Day in London Highlights Impressive Inorganic Growth in AI, Cloud, and Compute—but Critical Integration Challenges Remain”), Telefónica Tech is prioritizing rapid capability buildup and portfolio breadth. This now demands a strong focus on post-acquisition integration, service consistency, and unified go-to-market execution.

T-Systems’ ventures into the cloud domain focus—similarly to Orange—on the brand reputation around trust, data sovereignty, and identity management. Consequently, T-Systems focuses on providing sovereign cloud solutions for its enterprise customers utilizing Google Cloud resources, which are completely detached from any foreign influence and managed exclusively through T-Systems. This complements its existing partnerships for private and public cloud delivery, including the Open Telekom Cloud (built on OpenStack) and long-standing collaborations with SAP and VMware. To unite all these efforts under one roof and simplify the messaging, a new division called “T-Cloud” was formed in July 2025.

There is no doubt that operator-backed SIs like Orange Business, T-Systems, and Telefónica Tech are at a pivotal moment, as they face a significant opportunity to evolve beyond their traditional roles as connectivity providers, positioning themselves as foundational enablers of enterprise digital transformation. By expanding into cloud, AI, data integration, and cybersecurity, these players have the potential to become end-to-end infrastructure partners for businesses navigating complex digitization journeys.

In doing so, however, they will need to appreciate that this is still a new and highly dynamic market that needs new business models and innovative go-to-market strategies. To become credible digital infrastructure partners, they must develop a deep understanding of enterprise workload trends, developer ecosystems, and cloud-native operating practices.

First, telco-backed SIs will need to gain a thorough understanding of the cloud market, its nuances, and composition across different sub-domains. This includes not only differentiating between hyperscalers, neocloud providers, and sovereign platforms, but also grasping the varied demands of enterprise buyers across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) layers. Success will depend on their ability to identify where to build, where to partner, and where to differentiate. As demonstrated by Orange Business, Telefónica Tech, and T-Systems, a strong focus on trusted digital infrastructure can pay off in this context, as it can leverage the telco heritage to provide sovereign hosting, data governance, identity management, and compliance measures. Furthermore, these are areas where hyperscalers are more vulnerable and where trust-driven differentiation is possible.

Based on this thorough understanding, they should then define a focused partner strategy that clearly outlines their role within the different layers of the cloud value chain—whether as a provider, integrator, or orchestrator. For GPUaaS offerings, these SIs should, for example, consider the different types of neocloud providers, which ABI Research has segmented into GPU opportunists, AI collocation vendors, workload brokers, silicon-first vendors, and AI model developers in its recent Mapping the Neocloud Market Landscape report (AN-6465). Strategic partnerships should prioritize scalable neocloud providers, AI model developers, and silicon vendors, where co-creation, sovereign hosting, and vertical alignment can deliver real differentiation. Tactical relationships with brokers or colocation players may offer short-term value, but only deeply integrated, purpose-built alliances will position telcos as credible cloud-era infrastructure partners.