NICE — TM Forum Live! — Orange Business Services appears to have identified a number of skills gaps in its organization as it embarks on a more widespread rollout of SDN- and NFV-based services.
The operator, a division of French telecom incumbent Orange (NYSE: FTE), has already carried out service trials in France’s small and midsized enterprise market and is set to expand the scope and availability of its offering later this year. (See Orange Plots Wider Rollout of NFV for SMEs.)
As it works toward that goal, however, Orange Business Services (OBS) is quickly discovering that an NFV rollout is not just about network transformation.
“It’s a human revolution as well,” said Laurent Herr, the vice president of OSS for OBS, during a presentation at today’s TM Forum Live! event in Nice, France. “We need new hard skills on the network and IT side — the hardware guys need to understand what is happening on the OSS side and the IT people need to understand the network.”
In March, during the MPLS/SDN/NFV World Congress in Paris, OBS had drawn attention to some of the technical challenges it is facing as a result of its SDN and NFV program, but skirted over the issue of people skills.
Yet those look set to become increasingly important as the virtualization footprint grows. As part of what Herr calls “Phase 2” of the SDN and NFV rollout, Orange will deploy virtual network functions at a number of PoPs globally, having run them from a single PoP during the service trials.
The objective is to bring services closer to the customer, but the expansion is forcing OBS to adapt culturally as well as technologically.
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