Chief Executive Officer, Orange Business (and EVP, Orange Group), Orange Business
MWC23 interview: Aliette Mousnier-Lompre, CEO, Orange Business
Enterprise users need more than just connectivity as they embark on their digital transformation journeys, says Aliette Mousnier-Lompre, CEO at Orange Business, who is implementing a new strategy that is as much about delivering cloud and cybersecurity services as it is about reliable connectivity.
Featuring: Aliette Mousnier-Lompre, CEO, Orange Business
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About Aliette Mousnier-lompre
Aliette Mousnier-Lompré, CEO of Orange Business, stated in June 2025 that the company has built France’s first commercial quantum network, describing it as a "totally inviolable" system. She warned that a state capable of decrypting global data would gain a "huge competitive advantage," arguing that organizations must begin protecting against the coming quantum threat. In earlier interviews, she said Orange Business was on track with a plan to transform from a B2B telco player into a "leading European network and digital integrator," and that the company was targeting acquisitions in cybersecurity in Europe. She described sustainability as a "selection criteria" in customer tenders, noting that discussion of carbon emissions had become common in client meetings. In 2022 and 2023, Mousnier-Lompré said enterprise customers sought more "resilience, predictability, and reversibility" in their digital infrastructure. She argued that trust and sovereignty were central to Orange Business’s strategy, but cautioned against a "protectionist logic," advocating for an open yet controlled European data approach. She also said that generative AI was driving customer demand for data governance and infrastructure upgrades, as enterprises attempted to "embrace the new opportunities" of the technology.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
We're in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2023, and I'm here with Aliette Mousnier-Lompre, who is the CEO of Orange Business. Aliette, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us today. Now, what are enterprise users looking for from service providers such as Orange Business in 2023? What are the key requirements you're hearing from your customer base?
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre0:32
It's a very interesting period we are living. What we see is that digital transformation for enterprises in the past decade has brought massive agility, innovation, and productivity gains. But what we see and what we hear much more from our customers is that they want to regain control of what's happening. They need more resilience, they need more predictability, they need more reversibility. And I think this trend will be very important in the coming years. So what we try to do to support them is really to bring our capabilities as a network and digital integrator to help them, to accompany them at a global scale, to make sure that we provide them with our ability to monitor all the end-user and digital experience across connectivity, cloud, and cybersecurity, which is really the foundation of the digital value chain. And that we help them, as a consequence, monitor this end-to-end user experience. And we try to do this bringing our ethics and trust, which is very much entrenched into our corporate DNA, to make sure that whatever happens, we are there for our customers and we help them navigate the uncertainty.
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Interviewer1:55
Okay. Now, this greater focus on cybersecurity and digital services — this is something you've been talking about in the year or so that you've been the CEO of Orange Business. Has the new Orange Business strategy shift towards digital services offerings been completed? Are you there yet? Is the new Orange Business now in place?
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre2:17
So clearly, it's a never-ending journey. Change is the only thing which is not changing, so I wouldn't say everything is there yet. But what is very clear is that Orange Business historically has come with a very important strength in connectivity, and we've built this over the years. And today, I think we are one of the worldwide leaders in what I would describe as virtualized, secure connectivity for enterprises. So we want to leverage this strength and become the leading European network and digital integrator, supporting our customers across this triangle I was mentioning — connectivity, fiber, and cloud — to really help them monitor their digital infrastructure. Starting from there, we want to generate positive digital experiences as an outcome, and we are focusing on three topics. The employee experience, for instance — how do you successfully manage a migration to Teams, how do you secure this, how do you make sure it works from a WAN perspective? So employee experience is a first pillar. Then customer experience — how do we bring positive omnichannel strategies to our customers. And the last one is operational experience — how do we make sure that increasingly, in the plants, in the operational processes, we can leverage also our strengths in connectivity and make sure that we progressively automate the operational processes and bring more value to our customers.
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Interviewer3:56
Okay, excellent. Now, obviously, with Orange being the company it is, mobile technology and mobile services has played a big part in the company. How does 5G fit into the Orange Business proposition? What kind of offers does 5G underpin in your part of the business?
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre4:14
So 5G is a very important aspect of our portfolio because, as you've understood, we are starting again from our foundation, from connectivity, from the infrastructure. 5G progressively will bring much more agility, much more flexibility to our customers, generally speaking, when they deal with connectivity. For instance, I think that increasingly we'll go to fixed wireless access, which will enable us to be more flexible in rolling out connectivity, much faster, and to bring more redundancy and resilience to the connectivity of our customers. And apart from this, we are betting big on smart industry and what I was describing as operational experience. And here we really try to federate a very large ecosystem of partners, bringing 5G on the table, whether it's with public networks or increasingly with mobile private networks. And we work with our equipment manufacturer partners, device manufacturers, with also IoT players, with lots of startups, cloud hyperscalers, and so on, to try to build the right use cases for our customers. And we increasingly have, for instance, autonomous vehicles projects in plants or industrial campuses. We also automate lots of production lines. We work on virtual or augmented reality in the plants. Lots of projects.
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Interviewer5:48
Absolutely, so quite a lot already going on. But every company is always looking forward. So what's next for Orange Business? I mean, there was talk last year of not only organic growth but inorganic growth as well. Are there any areas where you need to find bolt-on additions to what you already have in your portfolio?
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre6:09
So first, what's coming next is executing our plan. Because making nice slides with shiny strategies is something, but what is really important is to execute. So we have a four-pillar transformation plan that we are progressing upon. It's about simplifying our portfolio of products. It's about making sure that our connectivity offers are fully virtualized, digitized, and that we transform the experience of connectivity as the cloud experience — with the elasticity and flexibility, and the service models that have made the success of the cloud ecosystem. We will transform our operating model also to bring much more agility — it's more end-to-end driven — but there are lots of transformation aspects. And indeed, we are also planning to go big into the digital space and to keep on potentially making targeted acquisitions. And we are targeting a few areas, the main one being cybersecurity. We are targeting bolt-on acquisitions in cybersecurity in Europe for the coming months and years.
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Interviewer7:21
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So we've talked here a lot about work, but we all have lives as well. And you have, I would say, a little more interesting life than most of us because you have a really high-profile sporting past as well. Can you just tell us very briefly about that?
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre7:37
So I used to be a semi-professional soccer, or football, player with the team of Paris Saint-Germain, the first national league in France. Now I'm retired from that, effectively. But there are actually lots of bridges you can do between team sports and how you run a company. I think this sense of purpose and common objective, the diversity and the complementarities you need in a team, the trust as well — I use a lot this analogy to drive my teams at Orange Business.
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Interviewer8:12
Okay, well, and hopefully that's a winning formula as well for you at Orange Business, as I'm sure it was at PSG. Aliette, thank you very much for joining us today.
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Aliette Mousnier-lompre8:22
Great to talk to you. Thanks a lot.