Hello, you're watching TelecomTV. I'm Guy Daniels. Now, voice remains a core service for operators, but the traditional IMS model has become economically unsustainable due to its complexity and high cost of ownership. Orange and ng-voice are fundamentally changing this by moving to an automated cloud-native IMS-as-a-Service platform. And joining me now to explain more are Franck Morales, who is SVP Marketing and Business Development at Orange Wholesale, and David Bachmann, who is CEO of ng-voice. Well, welcome to both of you. Thanks so much for joining us on the programme. Now, as I just mentioned, voice is still a core service for operators, but IMS has traditionally been complex and costly. Franck, how is Orange transforming its IMS service to meet its customers' needs?

Thanks for that, but first, let me tell you how excited we are about this announcement of IMS-as-a-Service offering, together with our partner ng-voice, leveraging their fully containerised and automated IMS. And to go to your point, we both strongly believe that voice remains a strategic service for our customers worldwide. But in today's world, the real needs are automation, scale efficiently, and launch services faster. And legacy IMS architecture infrastructure are not all fitted to answer these needs efficiently and economically speaking. This is even more important as today operators have to manage both 2G, 3G sunset transition, as well as delivering voice over IoT services. All this aligns with our own strategy that provides to mobile operators advantage of off-the-shelf and comprehensive suite of services like IMS-as-a-Service. And for that, ng-voice solution allows us to bring down the total cost of ownership and bring flexibility thanks to their on-demand scaling and end-to-end automation and a much smaller infrastructure footprint. This makes ng-voice the perfect partner for our IMS-as-a-Service and fitting our own strategy.

And Franck, you announced there that Orange Wholesale International is launching IMS-as-a-Service. But who is this service designed for and why is Orange so well positioned to offer it?

Yeah. So IMS-as-a-Service is designed for mobile operators and MVNOs, supporting mainly consumer services and IoT use cases. Then the why. Why Orange Wholesale? Let me give you a two-fold answer. We leverage first our operational experience to offer highly automated, cost-efficient shared platform to the wider operator community as Orange Wholesale has developed the necessary skillset to realise and succeed in the as-a-service offerings. Then Orange Wholesale is a global leader in voice and mobile solutions with proven expertise in delivering key services such as IPX connectivity, signalling, and as well roaming coverage with roaming sponsor and other types of services. With that, we think that we are well-placed first to understand and then to meet effectively the evolving needs of mobile operators.

Thank you, Franck. Well, David, let me turn to you now. From a technology perspective, what has fundamentally changed to allow IMS to be delivered as a service?

In short, we're leveraging the advantages of automation, containerisation, and AI. This enables on-demand scaling and end-to-end automation of the operations, all done with a significantly smaller resource footprint than traditional vendors. Combined, these shifts allow us to deliver high-quality voice services with up to 70% lower total cost of ownership and drastically simplified operations. Essentially, what we've done is that we've transformed the IMS from a heavy legacy telecom infrastructure into something that you can call a modern digital service. Here we are very thrilled to partner with Orange because we believe that they share two pieces of our core conviction, that voice remains mission critical, but that its economics and operational model must fundamentally evolve.

Great. Thanks very much, David. Well, let me pick up on what you just said there, and let me ask this next question to both of you, because when operators look at IMS-as-a-Service, what are the concrete economic or operational results that they should expect to see? And, Franck, can I come to you first?

That's a really good point, and benefits are mainly around what a network-as-a-service offering provides, with simplified management, enhanced customer experience, and a reduced capex economic model for them. For that, the major element has been to set up a shared service-based model, as this reduces both infrastructure duplication and operational effort, making IMS management at a much lower marginal cost, ensuring that operators are more focused on their business success, rather than each of them deploying efforts on owning and operating their own IMS platform.

And, David, what would you expect that the operators should see economically and operationally?

I totally agree with what Franck just said. I think operators can expect a fundamental shift in their economics. Infrastructure, the operating costs should drop from day one, and the time to market is going to be significantly reduced. What we do at the end is that the IMS is no longer a multi-year heavy infrastructure project, but it becomes a very flexible cloud-native service that scales precisely with real-time demand. So, together with Orange, we are delivering the IMS as a scalable, automated service that significantly reduces both costs and the time to market for operators globally.

Well, final question then to you, Franck. What does this launch represent for Orange strategically, and what should operators expect to see over the next 12 to 24 months?

This launch marks a shift in how we deliver voice. IMS-as-a-Service is a fully automated service-driven model with benefits of faster VoLTE and VoNR rollout, lower operating costs, and simpler lifecycle management. This launch reflects what our clients want solution-as-a-service to focus on their core business. Orange Wholesale has embraced this trend, and the IMS-as-a-Service we offer with ng-voice today complements our broader NaaS portfolio, like Core Network-as-a-Service, positioning us as a pioneer in the wholesale market for as-a-service.

Well, we must leave it there for now. Franck and David, good talking with you both, and thank you very much for sharing your views and news with us today. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.