● Orange VP for Software Engineering and newly nominated Orange Fellow Philippe Ensarguet is promoting this vision and sharing his expertise to break new ground for the Orange Group ecosystem.
● At the heart of his approach: a technological focus on software, cloud-native, automation, and AI, which is inseparable from human-centred and organizational development supported by active investment in open-source communities and peer networks.
Orange Group is at the forefront of an industry-wide paradigm shift in which telecommunications operators (Telcos) are embracing a new business model as technology companies (TechCos).
At Orange OpenTech 2025, Philippe Ensarguet, whose career is focused on this transition, has been nominated as an Orange Fellow: a distinction that is a Group-level acknowledgement of his expertise and leadership, as well as his capacity to guide Orange’s strategic choices and promote the Group ecosystem at the interface of IT and network services. In this new role, he will also reinforce Orange’s contribution to open source and peer communities and add momentum to our drive for shared innovation.
As Ensarguet recently pointed out in an opinion piece in Usbek & Rica: “For a company to be resilient — and therefore successful and robust — it is not enough for its IT systems to be resilient; the men and women who contribute to them must also be resilient.” People and organizational factors are at least as important as technology; their synergy sets the pace of transformation and reinforces its sustainability.
Tech is a living force. Its heartbeat is accelerating. We aren’t just building products; we are building ecosystems.
Setting out as a cloud-native telco
Philippe Ensarguet explains: “At Orange, our aim is to transform our operator infrastructure to make it cloud-native, scalable, resilient, and flexible. This approach embraces a horizontal model to create opportunities for IT resource pooling across the entire company, as illustrated in particular by the Sylva project.” The goal of this project, which brings together operators and network function vendors, is to establish a common, open-source software framework that will enable operators to embrace a standardized, simplified, and optimized cloud-native operational model more quickly.
Network functions, which are perfectly standardized from a functional point of view, have remained the same, but the environment surrounding them has been radically transformed. Software, automation, data, and AI are driving disruption, shaking up this entire ecosystem, in which Orange is determined to be a key player. “Tech is a living force. Its heartbeat is accelerating. We aren’t just building products; we are building ecosystems.”
Collective intelligence and the quality of exchanges play a crucial role in these ecosystems: “They are hotbeds of culture, exploration, and peer exchanges that stimulate me and empower the entire tech ecosystem, enabling it to adapt and recover when faced with adversity. Along with open source, the resilience and robustness of the tech ecosystem is a subject that deeply concerns me as a European citizen.”
To become an AI-Native telco
The next stage in Orange’s journey is the transition from cloud-native telco to AI-native telco. As AWS technology director Kaniz Mahdi and Orange CTO Laurent Leboucher wrote in May 2025, “The fusion of AI and Networks is no longer a future prospect: it’s already reshaping the entire telecom industry landscape.” Today, there is a critical need for reflection on “the networks that make artificial intelligence possible.” Promoting discussion on how they can be perfected is a major aspect of Philippe Ensarguet’s mission at Orange, as he takes up his pilgrim’s staff and sets out to discover other possible futures.
New Orange Fellow Philippe Ensarguet :
Philippe Ensarguet began his career in 1996 at a Rennes-based IT services company, Alliance Qualité Logicielle (AQL), which was acquired in 1998 by the Grenoble-based company Silicomp and renamed Silicomp-AQL before being taken over almost a decade later by Orange Business Services in 2007. In the years that followed, he served as CTO for the IT&L@bs Orange Applications for Business unit, before taking on the same role for Orange Business Services in 2019: a transition that he has described as highlighting “the colossal importance of tech for transforming our clients’ businesses.” In response to this context, he established a “CTO office that brought together all the technical directors from the different entities enabling us to develop a common cloud-native vision that integrates the fundamentals of software and automation.” In recognition of this initiative which demonstrated his comprehensive vision of the trajectory of technological transformation, he was named Trailblazer of the Year by a panel of his peers at Mobile Europe’s CTO Awards in 2021. Since 2023, he has been VP for Software Engineering at Orange Group where he has supported and accelerated the transformation of the telecommunications operator with digital ecosystem technologies and best practices.
Leveraging his dual expertise in IT and networks, two key fields for Orange, Philippe Ensarguet’s strategic approach is driven by technology and innovation. It is also informed by extensive experience not only of the Orange ecosystem but also of wide range of external environments, where he has taken up the challenge of developing his knowledge and his skills while building a far-reaching network of peers.
Philippe Ensarguet serves as an advisor for several tech startups and a number of investment funds including Orange Ventures. He also represents the Orange Group within the Linux Foundation Europe and is a member of the Tech.Rocks community for technology managers and executives in France.
He was nominated an Orange Fellow in 2025.
