Innovation and Change at Orange

I received an email from Orange stating that their Partner guy Steve Glagow was leaving. Here is a bit of his summary statement.

The Orange Partner focus over the last five years has been about taking your applications to our customers. We have successfully launched Application Shops in the UK, France, Belgium and Spain, reaching over 50 million customers in just those 4 countries. In the near future, we will add more.
After 5 great years, it is time for me to say farewell. I have seen our community grow from a handful of dedicated developers to over 55000 today. I am proud to have been a part of it working with you.

I was always very impressed with the breadth and scope of the Orange API offering. However, I've seen the developer play as only one leg in a complete go to market strategy. For those doubters, remember Apple has made something like $30 Billion with their one device and less than $100 million on the Appstore. The Appstore is a rounding error for Apple. For another example, SalesForce doesn't even break out their App Exchange revenue numbers clearly. At best estimate looking at their professional services line item the AppExchange is less then 10% of revenue. However, for Apple and SalesForce, their platform strategy has clearly helped to make their core offerings dominant.

Yet, Orange has done a lot of things right. Although BT received the most initial praise as a Global Telco launching their own API strategy, from my perspective Orange's API offerings ended up far ahead of the pack.

Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball but the rest of the go to market strategy for Orange should include:
A. Becoming a technology enabling vendor with ISVs and SaaS partners.
B. Creating and leveraging the SI ecosystem attached to ISVs and SaaS partners
C. Creating two sided business models leveraging analytics with these various partners
D. Building workflows or integration methods to leverage other development tools more commonly used by developers.

There is a lot of operational sales, prod. dev, integration, bus. dev. and marketing work to move forward with these four legs of a go-to market strategy. Be assured, the Telco that does it first and best will maintain healthy margins, keep customers happy, and drive their competitors crazy. At least in the US, I plan on making Jaduka the winner. Across the EU, I was expecting Orange to win.

Patrick Murphy
Jaduka
VP. Business Development