Haier Europe recently selected Orange Business to power the connectivity and IoT services for its global digital transformation effort spread across 50 sites, capping what had been a year-long push by the home appliance firm to deploy a new communications architecture for powering its long-term support and growth plans.

Simone Pezzoli, group chief digital technology officer for Haier Europe, told SDxCentral that the firm spent considerable time researching vendors for what is a “cornerstone” of his firm’s digital transformation efforts that span from “Argentina to China.” This included meeting with “six service providers around the globe.”

“If you look in the right hand corner of the Gartner or Forrester Research, you would you go through those kinds of vendors and we went through all that with their offering trying to understand this is what we are kind of thinking, what would you suggest in our situation with our comparables in the market, with companies that already have done this similar project and what do you suggest,” Pezzoli said.

This first round of decision making then led to Haier Europe creating proposal requests and then to it starting a tendering process.

“During the tendering process we were already, I would say, 70%, 80% clear on where we wanted to get, but we wanted also to understand what was clearly the technical part of it, what they were proposing from the technical side of the equation, what they were also offering from a security component because we wanted to touch both items together; the networking capabilities, but also the security capabilities together,” Pezzoli said.

The “Argentina to China” aspect also required Haier Europe to take geo-political considerations into its decision making process.

“The possibility of those companies to support our operation in certain countries, like, for instance, ... China ..., some places where sometimes it's difficult to deal with local regulations, with compliance requirements and those kinds of things that will have to be considered in a global scale initiative,” Pezzoli said. Executive buy-in Those future opportunities were an important aspect of Pezzoli gaining executive buy-in for Haier Europe’s digital transformation program. Pezzoli said that the broader initiative needed to be backed by a “solid business case” and tie into what he described as Haier Europe’s “5-year plan.”

“We need to have a solid business case for every single initiative that we are running and especially on digital transformation as those will have to integrate with strategic initiatives,” Pezzoli said. “So they needed to be very much in line with the 5-year plan and they needed to be aligned to what the 5-year plan says.”

With technology evolving at near light-speed, Pezzoli’s work also included a lot of explaining of acronyms, which he described as “a full-time job.”

“I try to translate not only networking things, but also the security piece,” Pezzoli said. “It's part of my day-to-day job trying to make sure that the people from the senior management team are at least kind of understanding what we are doing and why we're doing it.”

Pezzoli did jokingly add that while he did not want to “shoot myself in the foot,” this is “becoming easier because people are much more educated, especially in the digital world.”

“Especially on the benefits on the financial the digital transformation side of the equation, because even if sometimes in manufacturing, there are some of the infrastructure that are a little bit more reluctant to transform themselves,” Pezzoli said. “But now I think in 2024 with generative AI and all those trends happening around them, I think it was an eye opener and for many professional even if they're not digitally savvy, they are trying to get themselves up to speed.”

Haier Europe wanted a partner Pezzoli also explained that the decision to work with Orange Business simplified its deployment and management process, which was one of the first items discussed when Haier Europe began talking with partners on this process.

“We wanted to have partners, we don't want to have just a vendor,” Pezzoli said. “We just don't want to have someone that is implementing something but someone that is helping us out to implement to the right level of accuracy, do that within the right level of time, and also providing world-class service and support. And that's what we are measuring Orange against.”

“We don't have infinite resources to deliver on our initiative nor to sustain it in the future,” Pezzoli said. “So having a trusted partner that can also help us out, not only during the execution of the delivery phase of the program but also to manage going forward and help us out in the in the near future for other transformation initiatives, for us it was paramount.”

Laurent Perrin, director for overlay connectivity solutions at Orange Business, explained that Haier’s path is becoming increasingly common among enterprise customers.

“We see enterprises looking for a unified management model that is covering the network and the security, but at the same time there are also differences in each organization in the way the network and the security is being managed,” Perrin said.

The move itself has Orange Business tapping its recently launched Evolution Platform to help Haier Europe on its digital transformation efforts. That Orange Business platform is a defined roadmap based on orchestrating three pivotal building blocks – cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity – with Haier Europe’s initial deployment focused on the platform’s Flexible SD-WAN and Cyberdefense Security to provide a network-as-a-service (NaaS) experience.

What Orange Business brought to the table Orange Business’ Evolution Platform allows enterprise customers to “compose” their own services through a self-service console or an API, which can also be used to service chain those offerings, with those services managed by Orange with service level agreements (SLAs). The Haier Europe deal includes moving from legacy MPLS services to an SD-WAN service and security components from Zscaler to support secure service edge (SSE).

“This will allow us to be much more efficient and effective in how we are supporting our markets, especially in the speeds which we will be able to deliver those solutions and giving them access to specific services that will be delivered by our digital technology organization,” Pezzoli said of what Orange Business is able to provide.

Pezzoli specifically cited cases where a delay in obtaining an MPLS connection would cause a delay in opening a new branch location.

“It was taking a few days to be delivered while with the SD-WAN taking much less time and it's much easier to deliver,” Pezzoli said, adding that it was also much easier to set up the security component using the SD-WAN connection. “All the configurations that are being delivered in one piece can be replicated and working toward an effective way of automating the configuration for our users in both the exposure to external services and the internal services to provide comprehensive coverage across the different services.”

There was also a need for long-term flexibility to accommodate future needs. Pezzoli noted the potential need to provide direct access to a hyperscaler, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform “or to like SAP that is also improving the experience of our people.”

Specific to the Haier deal, Perrin said that the SD-WAN service is connecting with the Zscaler security offering for a secure service edge (SSE) deployment. He added that Orange Business was also working to tie-in full automation for cloud networking “so we can bring an on-demand cloud networking service to our customers.”

The operator last year integrated VMware’s SD-WAN into the platform, which was the first Evolution Platform integration move. Perrin added that Orange Business has since worked to integrate SD-WAN services from Cisco, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks.

“With also the capability for some customers we are able to integrate on-demand other SD-WAN,” Perrin said. “For example, if we have a project with another technology like Versa we can do it. We can work with our customers to support it in our platform, so it's not limited to these partners, we are standardizing in the platform, the platform is flexible to onboard new partners to support specific customer requests.”

ISG last year labeled the carrier as a “leader” across the five sectors the research firm tracks: managed SD-WAN, SDN transformation services, Enterprise networks technology and service suppliers, edge technologies and services, and secure access service edge (SASE) solutions and services. AT&T and Verizon Business were also tagged as leaders by ISG.

Vertical Systems Group came to a similar conclusion, ranking Orange, AT&T and Verizon Business as the three top global providers of carrier-managed SD-WAN services. That ranking was based on global market share outside of a provider’s home country.

Perrin added that the Haier Europe deal highlights the importance of integrating this leadership position into the flexibility of its Evolution Platform is key to help organization’s work through different digital transformation processes.

“It's very important for us to do co-design, co-innovation with customers,” Perrin said. “We are building our solutions with customers and that's really part of the policy that we have, that we have adopted and that we are reinforcing with the Evolution platform. It's not designing services first with our ideas. It's really building them together with our customers so that we can really align with their needs, their business objectives, and also we can really have something that is flexible and able to support the new needs that will appear in the coming years.”