Being part of the FreeMove alliance has resulted in a 30% increase in the number of bids for multinational companies’ (MNC) business, and a 40% increase in bids won, Cynthia Gordon, Orange Business Solutions’ marketing director, said.
Gordon said that FreeMove’s multi-territory offering meant that customers that would not previously have considered a mobile strategy have started to come to do business with the operator, and she credits the alliance strategy for pulling in recent contracts worth tens of thousands of connections.
FreeMove is an alliance between Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica and Telecom Italia Mobile, and it provides a single point of customer access to a corporate customer, while providing a service that looks and feels the same to customers, wherever they are in the FreeMove footprint. It means the operators have had to do a lot of work on how they will manage bids and resolve roaming issues. In short, who gets the money!
So are all the operators playing nicely? Well Gordon admits that there are “always challenges”, hinting that a lot of work has been done on bid management issues, but says that on the whole things have worked out OK.
Another plus for Orange, and an area it continues to be considerably more excited about that other operators, is M2M. Orange has just done a deal with Siemens to enable it to provide service to Siemens’ M2M modules. Siemens has about a 305 market share of the M2M module market, and a large utility and professional services capability, so this is a big deal for Orange. Gordon says it means the operator no has 90% of the addressable M2M market in its sights.
Of course, at first glance, telemetry doesn’t look very profitable or exciting for network operators. It gives them a slight uptick in data traffic, small bursts perhaps at times when the network is otherwise under-utilised. But Gordon says its M2M service is important because it is just that, a service. When Orange consults with companies on the benefits of M2M — for example allowing remote diagnostics, ordering, pay as you go usage models for office machinery or car use — it “moves it up the value chain” according to Gordon. This is important for an operator because, as Gordon admits, a mobile operator is not always the most obvious IT partner. But Gordon has said that in at least one major instance (Norwich Union) the operator has won valuable voice business on the back of impressing the client with its M2M strategy.