Orange’s Laurent Leboucher received the Technology Leader Award at FutureNet World in London in May. He talks to Contributing Editor Annie Turner about his pioneering and ongoing involvement in key trends that form the bedrock of telecoms today. 

The Technology Leader Award is in recognition of exceptional leadership, innovation and sustained application of AI and automation in the network. Orange’s Laurent Leboucher joins an alumni of previous winners which includes Ibrahim Gedeon of TELUS, Telefónica‘s Enrique Blanco, Howard Watson of BT and Vodafone Group’s Scott Petty.

Leboucher graduated from the highly regarded Ecole Polytechnique de Paris and Télécom Paris, an engineering school, followed by a PhD in computer science. He says his passions are maths, physics and computer science. From any early age his hobbies included coding video games, but he also likes sailing, mountain biking and skiing.

About his work he states, “I love computing and leveraging technologies which impact people and society for good. I applied it to IT or what I call for fun the ‘bright side’ of the force and Networking, which I call the ‘dark side’. I alternate between the two, bridging the gap whenever I can.”

His early professional experiences were applying supercomputing to physical problems, such as at Cray Research in Minneapolis or the Advanced Computer Lab at Las Alamos National Laboratory. He worked to develop, vectorise and parallelise a neural network algorithm which could recognise and classify satellite ground images when Neural Networks and AI were in their infancy.

Leboucher joined France Télécom in 1992 and learned the fundamentals of an operator’s field network operations. He then moved to research where he became an expert on distributed systems and applications for intelligent networks. He also created a ‘software and security’ start-up before rejoining France Télécom in 2004.

As lead architect, he contributed significantly to merging the legacy IT for fixed, mobile and internet at home into a consistent, converged information system. The operator adopted Orange as its global consumer brand in 2006 and changed the entire organisation’s name to Orange in 2013.

Now, as Executive Vice President Networks & Group Chief Technology Officer at Orange, Leboucher pinpoints 2013-2014 as when he began work on what have become some of the most important IT architecture transformations to help operators move away from legacy silos. He relocated to Texas in the US, working on Orange’s collaboration with AT&T and began engaging deeply with GSMA and TM Forum at the start of its groundbreaking work on open APIs.

The Forum launched its Open API Manifesto in 2016. Leboucher notes, “At the time it wasn’t extremely successful overall but it was the first awareness among operators that they had to open their stack to developers for different go-to markets.”

“I worked very hard on B2B and B2B2X use cases,” to which Open APIs could be applied, he recalls. “Now operators implement some of those APIs for processes like order, quote and billing on the B2B side between some platforms and customers. Open APIs are also critical between operators on the wholesale side.” This enables Orange to extend its capabilities globally across others’ networks and vice versa.

APIs are essential to building flexible, modular IT platforms (as Jeff Bezos was famously quick to realise). Shortly after the launch of the Open API Manifesto, TM Forum began work on what evolved into the Open Digital Architecture (ODA), designed as a blueprint to help telcos think about how they could apply platform models.

The API story and Orange’s deep involvement in it continues now with Network APIs. The operator is one of the leaders within GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative and the Linux Foundation’s CAMARA. Leboucher says, “We are creating use cases that were not possible back then, leveraging network capabilities.”

One example is Number Verify, which leverages the authentication embedded in the SIM card and mobile network to confirm that users are genuinely in possession of their mobile number, without requiring any action from them. This makes onboarding, login and transaction validation smoother and more secure, helping protect customers from fraud without relying on SMS one-time passwords. Another example is using Network APIs for branded communications from companies so that recipients can be confident that the caller is bona fide.

“Operators around the world are monetising APIs,” Leboucher says. “We can create trust… we can leverage our assets and aggregate good capacities through standard APIs as we are doing today.”

APIs are critical too in 5G network slicing where each slice might have different characteristics regarding coverage and latency, among other parameters, to meet the quality of experience expected as a developer. “The Network APIs make the network attributes easily consumable…it is a very important development and we are in the middle of that journey today,” Leboucher notes.

“To accelerate and scale, we created a business platform called Orange LiveNet, which is led by Otilia Anton. We started with very focused API products but the goal is clear – we are exposing and monetising our network capabilities at the scale of the Orange group to developers, aggregators and large digital natives,” he adds.

Orange Telco Cloud

When talking about platforms, Leboucher stresses the difference between business models and the architecture and operation side. He notes, “To expose all those new capabilities including AI-native features, it’s necessary to change the operating model to make it much more ‘cloud-native’, agile and resilient. Orange Telco Cloud is at the heart of this new operating model. It is a strong movement and I am proud of what we achieved together to bring Orange Telco Cloud to where it is today.”

He adds, “The key word is ‘platform’. We are creating a network platform, with Orange Telco Cloud as its foundation. Our ambition is to scale it, step by step, across Orange’s footprint, bringing the benefits of AI and network automation, and exposing intent-based connectivity capabilities to our ecosystem, including developers, in a consistent, non-fragmented way.”

“This is an important part of the story. It allows us to come up with new business models, new ways of working and, underneath the hood [bonnet if you’re British] there is a new operating model which is more than a technical operating model. It is central to how we are thinking about network transformation in our strategic plan, Trust the future,” Leboucher continues.

The plan has three pillars: customer intimacy; innovative growth and excellence at scale. With the last one in mind he says, “Success is about creating platforming capabilities, including network capabilities, that can be leveraged at the scale of a group like Orange,” instead of redoing and reinventing things for each of the 26 countries in which it operates.

The Orange Telco Cloud is deployed in more than 20 countries, allowing network functions and services to be operated the way hyperscalers operate their cloud infrastructure. “Orange Telco Cloud is operated from one place, with one factory running the full ecosystem that is easily embraced in all the different places. We limit the number of releases and simplify as much as possible, so that it’s extremely standardised and highly automated, making it efficient,” Leboucher explains.

Creating and measuring value

He elaborates, “We have more than 70 clusters in production, on which we deploy network functions. Some are simple, but we also have critical functions and the core network with the IMS platform on that same distributed cloud.”

Having a network that is largely software based increases the attack surface and cybersecurity risk. Leboucher notes, “When we speak about CI/CD for the network, it’s DevSecOps. The tools and the pipeline that run the CI/CD become strategic, a key part of the architecture. It’s not just a tool outside the network, it’s directly linked to the production environment.”

Hence resilience has risen up the agenda alongside softwarisation, AI and automation – which is not negative: along with greater risk comes opportunity in the form of value via productisation. He explains, “Our B2B and B2C customers are much more aware… we want to bring them real value. Not some hidden insurance customers will never use, but something active and visible that protects their connectivity every day, every hour in all situations.”

Productisation and quality

Leboucher says, “On the network side, but not only on the network, we try to work more globally, to create a product mindset. We bring together product managers and network technical people, engineers, to understand how we can create value and scale that value across our different footprints.

“For example, we are developing an internal product that can leverage data from the Network and IT so we can be much, much smarter in how we spend our capex – we call it ‘Next Best Euro’. We want to be much more efficient to address our customers’ specific requirements which may vary according to their habits, way of life, commuting patterns between home and office, etc.”

He adds, “Data can tell us about network performance with measurements related to the signal, coverage and capacity, and we can combine that with other data to understand customers’ quality of experience. Network technical performance data is relatively easy, but quality of experience is a bit more challenging. Our model is trained to maximise quality of experience and reduce churn propensity.

“More globally, when we use AI to automate, we expect value, efficiency, savings, go-to-market, quality and reduced churn. It all needs to be measured, to be understood.”

At the NGMN Alliance

Finally, what about Leboucher’s role at the NGMN Alliance? He says, “It is a fantastic forum…I have the honour to chair the board. It’s a place where we can identify and agree on the most important, particular messages operators want to say to the industry, especially on the way we should frame the evolution of mobile networks and 6G as an example.”

He adds, “NGMN’s role is not detailed specification but to voice issues that really matter. We create a place for debate, to identify topics – even those that are controversial – to bring together different views. Sometimes we don’t reach immediate consensus…but NGMN organises an open debate which most of the time concludes positively. It’s a good way to simplify and insist on what really matters.”

Which in many ways sums up the guiding principles of Leboucher’s career so far.