FRANCE TELECOM UNITES BRANDS, WILL SELL SERVICES AS ORANGE

France Telecom is about to paint the globe orange. The telecom giant is making a major global push and surrendering its traditional name in the interest of creating a single global brand that is associated with its intended strengths: convergence of IP, IT and mobility, combined with simplicity for all customers.

Accordingly, France Telecom and its subsidiaries, including global carrier Equant, will soon operate under the Orange brand, favoring the U.K.-based mobile operator also owned by France Telecom.

“The Orange brand is more stretchable,” said Barbara Dalibard, group executive vice president of FT's enterprise communications services division and CEO of Equant, at an international press event in Boston. “We believe it will impart the values of innovation and strong customer experience, and we will use this brand to build on those values.”

The strategy doesn't so much remake France Telecom and its subsidiaries as it tightens their focus on what executives believe are its considerable strengths. At the center of the strategy is NexT, a three-year transformation plan launched this summer that includes technical, financial and service goals for the company.

“Our goal is to be the reference service provider in Europe,” Dalibard said. “We want to provide a new experience in telecom, which we think can be life changing for our customers. We will be leaders in innovation — we are increasing our R&D spending by 20% this year.”

A primary focus of that investment is on making convergence simpler for customers and controlling the costs of deployment. For small to medium-sized companies, that means connecting multiple locations over the least-cost and most available networking forms, she said.

Two other examples of that effort are a convergence service called Business Everywhere and a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation to create Minimo, an integrated mobile browser.

Business Everywhere puts a software client on the PC that enables a mobile worker to easily connect to any form of access — ADSL, mobile, Wi-Fi, public network — and operate voice, data and video services, including video conferencing, with relative ease. The service also streamlines security and authentication and provides a common set of applications from any IP-enabled device.

By 2008, FT expects to have more than 1 million Business Everywhere users, Dalibard said.

“IP convergence will completely change the way companies do business, and they need a different way to access employees,” she said. “The interaction is more critical; more real-time connections are needed.”

Minimo, developed at FT's Boston R&D labs, is based on open-source code, opening application development to anyone who wants it, said Brenda Belleville, director of marketing for Equant North America. It will initially be available on Windows CE devices.

“We can create a single unified user experience that encompasses mobile and desktop,” she said. “This will speed up the development of applications and make sure customers have easy access to data without special-purpose equipment.”

Equant, once partly owned by FT and as of this year completely under its umbrella, will benefit greatly from the added resources and the R&D available, said Mack Treece, head of sales and marketing for Equant in the Americas.

The data networking company will continue to focus heavily on helping large enterprise customers outsource more of their networking operations as they converge on IP, he said.

Equant's game plan includes maximum flexibility in how it packages services and outsourcing capabilities for its customers, Treece added, including a movement to the utility model, where corporations pay by the seat and get a fixed cost for all services.