Home appliances manufacturer Haier Europe, part of the Fortune 500 smart-home division of China-based Haier Group, has appointed Orange Business to supply enterprise connectivity and IoT services, plus cybersecurity tools, to modernize and digitize its business operations in Europe, including its manufacturing and logistics processes. Orange Business, the enterprise division of France-based Orange Group, is providing its new Evolution Platform to the firm, which assembles sundry tech services in a modular cloud environment.
Haier Europe owns the Candy and Hoover brands, acquired from Candy-Hoover in 2019; it also sells home appliances under its parent brand. It ranks third for market share among home appliance manufacturers in Europe, with an annual turnover of around €3.6 billion. The Evolution Platform makes Orange’s networking, computing, and cybersecurity services available to enterprises in a modular fashion in a cloud-based environment – in the way standard cloud services are generally consumed (and traditional telco services are not).
It is a “greenfield” build, from scratch, said the operator at its launch in London at the end of last year; new services, plus some old ones, will be migrated onto the platform over time. Software partners / solutions are being ‘onboarded’, still. The idea is to present a simplified portfolio, which ultimately trims the old Orange Business Services (OBS) roster by a third, down to 12 core products, plus partner entries. These are being sold to enterprises as “digital building blocks” via a “cloud-native delivery model”. At launch, last year, the platform embedded VMWare’s “flexible” software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solution — which is not being taken by Haier Europe, as it goes.
More bespoke services like private 5G will eventually be hosted on the Evolution Platform, too. It underpins the enterprise unit’s own “techco-to-telco” transformation, and its bid to return to profitability by 2025 as a reformatted digital-change agent. Orange Business said Haier had picked it to help it “innovate its sustainable solutions, while optimizing resource consumption and extending the life of products”, as well as to “establish itself as a composable, data-driven enterprise”. The platform will be plugged into its “design, production, and consumption practices”, it said.
A statement said: “For example, the company is currently developing an innovative servitization model called ‘pay-per-wash’, which is managed directly by Haier’s apps. [It] was looking for a cloud-first platform that could align technology with its business objectives to maintain its competitive advantage. Furthermore, Haier was in search of a composable and adaptable network that delivers a complete end-to-end service, with both openness and advanced security… The technology combines a network-as-a-service experience with an open ecosystem to enable Haier to access solutions as needed, all fortified by performance-focused SLAs.”
Orange Business said it has defined a roadmap based on “orchestrating” its cloud, connectivity, and cybersecurity infrastructure as “pivotal building blocks”. It will advise on the “underlay and overlay options” related to the SD-WAN setup to “best suit the business”, it said. This will include a cybersecurity “protection suite” to secure network and server access, including across public and private cloud environments, for 5,000 staff. The whole piece will be managed by a customer portal, which includes network performance monitoring for “control and visibility”.
Simone Pezzoli, group chief digital technology officer at Haier Europe, said: “As part of our transformation, we needed a platform that would help us optimize operations and efficiencies within our cloud-first strategy. Orange Business provides us with an agile and composable platform, simplifying cloud connectivity and automation, while being elastic enough to satisfy our dynamic business model and digital ambitions.”
Francesca Puggioni, managing director for Southern Europe at Orange Business, said: “Haier Europe will benefit from our cloud, connectivity, and security expertise through Evolution Platform. This highly optimized platform is designed to accelerate digital transformation while providing high visibility on processes to enhance business performance. We are excited for the opportunity to offer this solution to a leading company like Haier Europe and support them in their digital journey.”
