Orange S.A. ORANY recently announced a collaboration with Red Hat, a provider of open-source solutions. This partnership will integrate containerized and virtual network functions using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Having embarked on its international network transformation journey eight years ago, Orange adopted a network softwarization strategy to virtualize network functions. This approach aims to enhance flexibility, cost efficiency and control over its network and service deployments. Orange successfully virtualized more than 30 telecom functions from 12 different vendors, including SD-WAN, voice, content delivery networks (CDN) and roaming. Establishing a telco cloud infrastructure was a key element of this strategy, ensuring a widespread footprint that delivers latency of under 10 milliseconds for any business-to-business (B2B) or wholesale customer.

Orange Price and Consensus

Orange price-consensus-chart | Orange Quote

To further accelerate its transition to cloud-native services, Orange has selected Red Hat platforms as the foundation for its infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift will serve as the core for cloud-native network functions, while OpenShift Virtualization will enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads. Additionally, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across Orange’s global network. Through this partnership, Orange is implementing a vendor-agnostic cloud-native and automation framework that strengthens its network services softwarization and industrialization.

What Does This Collaboration Offer?

Orange's new platform will support a range of use cases, including SD-WAN, SASE gateway, IMS, 4G and 5G core, Internet of Things (IoT) and roaming services. So far, six new points of presence (PoPs) have been successfully deployed.

Through its collaboration with Red Hat, Orange enhances agility, enabling faster responses to customer needs and market shifts. Key benefits of the platform include greater availability with improved lifecycle management and near-zero downtime, enhanced flexibility with seamless support for virtualized and containerized workloads, and accelerated time-to-market through automation and zero-touch provisioning, reducing human error and deployment time by four times.

Additionally, the platform boosts resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), strengthens security through network and container isolation, and lowers carbon footprint with optimized hardware.

Orange plans to expand its telco cloud infrastructure to 75 PoPs globally within two years, transitioning from 50 OpenStack platforms and adding 25 new PoPs. By reusing existing equipment and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift’s power monitoring, Orange aims to meet sustainability goals while improving efficiency.

ORANY’s Zacks Rank & Stock Price Performance

Orange currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Shares of the company have increased 16.3% in the past three months against the Zacks Wireless Non-US industry's decline of 0.4%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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Stocks to Consider in Computer & Technology Space

Some better-ranked stocks from the broader technology space are InterDigital, Inc. IDCC, KLA Corporation KLAC and Flex Ltd. FLEX. IDCC presently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), whereas KLAC and FLEX carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for InterDigital’s 2025 earnings per share is pegged at $9.30, unchanged in the past seven days. IDCC earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in three of the trailing four quarters while missing in one, with the average surprise being 158.4%. The company’s long-term earnings growth rate is 15%. Its shares have jumped 58.9% in the past six months.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for KLA Corporation fiscal 2025 earnings per share is pegged at $31.59, unchanged in the past seven days. KLAC earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in three of the trailing four quarters, with the average surprise being 6.35%. The company’s long-term earnings growth rate is 15.6%. Its shares have increased 6.4% in the past three months.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Flex’s fiscal 2025 earnings per share is pegged at $2.61, unchanged in the past seven days. FLEX’s earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in each of the trailing four quarters, with the average surprise being 15.66%. The company’s long-term earnings growth rate is 7.3%. Its shares have gained 23.6% in the past six months.

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KLA Corporation (KLAC) : Free Stock Analysis Report

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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