Telco says Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) helps it meet local requirements for cloud environments and accelerate AI adoption
Long-term partners Orange and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to deploy artificial intelligence, including gen AI, closer to Orange’s and its customers’ operations.
Orange said its new deployments aim to expand opportunities in countries and industries where local cloud environments are required. Google Distributed Cloud is a fully managed hardware and software solution that can be used to build and train AI models on Google Cloud using selected Vertex AI services and deploy and run locally at the edge. The telco can also use it to deploy ready to use Google Cloud products, such as Dataproc and AlloyDB as the building blocks for a custom-built solution.
Building applications with the latest in AI innovations can be challenging and scaling AI across multiple edge locations adds to the complexity. However, key to the service is that customers can build apps in full isolation with no connectivity to the public internet which is important for global telcos wanting to provide sovereign AI services.
This so-called air-gapped option does not require connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet to manage the infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling, and is built to remain disconnected in perpetuity. Google said its open architecture creates familiarity across both public and air-gapped private clouds.
Orange will use GDC in three areas. The first is to have an environment to run sensitive network data and AI workloads that some country regulators may require to be local or on-premises. The second is that the telco will be able to run gen AI models on-premises in an environment that is integrated into similar Vertex AI services on Google Cloud.
Lastly, beyond the contact centre, Orange has leveraged AI and Google Cloud technology to deliver personalised recommendations for relevant phones, plans, and services–improving customer lifetime value. GDC also allows gen AI-based speech recognition to occur in each Orange country, bringing these AI technologies even to countries without a Google Cloud region.
“We have a mission to accelerate value creation for Orange with every job, every network, and every customer experience super-powered by responsible AI. Orange sees enormous value in AI across every dimension of our business,” said Orange Group CEO Christel Heydemann.
“This partnership with Google Cloud and the cutting-edge solutions announced today are foundational to Orange achieving AI at scale and is a major step towards unlocking significant value from all of our data,” she added.
Bringing cloud to Orange’s data centres
The companies said the collaboration will bring the cloud to Orange’s own data centres, protecting sensitive workloads that must stay on-premises and enabling Orange to filter extremely high-volume data, such as over one petabyte a day of network telemetry. Orange said it will also enable local teams to deploy AI applications faster.
“Businesses are increasingly bringing gen AI solutions to the edge of the network to ensure better agility, responsiveness, and resilience,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “Our partnership with Orange addresses that need, combining data, reliable infrastructure, and leading AI technologies to create new solutions to meet Orange’s global needs.”
Orange and Google Cloud have collaborated since 2020 when they signed a strategic partnership to accelerate the transformation of Orange’s IT infrastructure and the development of future cloud services, in particular edge computing. Over the past three years, Orange has migrated 13 petabytes of data to Google Cloud and has many strategic use cases in production across ten countries running on Google Cloud.