Industry Spotlight: Orange Business’ Farès Sakka on Helping Industries Down the Next Generation Path

All the benefits of next generation technologies that are becoming available from the cloud won’t benefit anyone unless they are integrated into operations successfully.  From automation to AI, there are always resistance to change and fear of the unknown to overcome.  How does a large organization make the transition successfully? And what happens if they don’t?  With us today to talk about it is Farès Sakka, Director of Smart Industries, Americas for Orange Business.

TR: What is your background and what drew you to Orange Business?

FS: I joined Orange Business in 2013 through a French-funded government program. Since then, I have held multiple leadership roles in business development, pre-sales engineering, and IoT strategy. I enjoy working within Orange Business because as a global company, we see things holistically. We have a global perspective with a local touch, and we strive to help our multinational customers build the right infrastructure to navigate through hybrid worlds. I’m passionate about problem solving, and I love when it’s driven by bringing the technology and the business growth, together.

TR: How does Orange Business look to support development of smart industries?

FS: We help our customers, in manufacturing especially, navigate through the complexities of what we call hybrid worlds.  When it comes to manufacturing, we have the Information Technology (IT) world and the Operational Technology (OT) world, two different parallel universes that need to be merged, enabling and embracing new IT technology within the OT production environment.

TR: What do you mean by hybrid worlds, and why are they difficult to navigate?

FS: When you think about digital infrastructure in general, there is the physical world and the software world.  With IT and OT, it is pretty much the same. The challenges are related to the maturity of the industry. Often, it’s about integrating legacy systems that still exist within the production environment with IT technology.  In the IT world, you have things like the routers, the switches and the cloud. On the OT side, you have the programmable logical controllers and the SCADA systems, which are systems that acquire data from the different machines and processes. One is digital and the other one is physical. When you connect the two together, there are challenges with the two ecosystems understanding each other.  You need to be able to capture the data of an IT solution and correlate it with data that is captured from a machine or a sensor. You need to make it as interoperable as possible to make sure that the manufacturing environment benefits from the creation of that data to make real-time decisions, for instance.

The challenges are not only about legacy systems, it is also about the fear of disruption, the fear of having the assembly line or the production line stopping for a moment to integrate those new technologies. Product, productivity, quality, and safety are extremely important on the OT side. For them, IT is just like a black box. When they transition to new technologies, they want to avoid operational downtime. 

Another fear is actually resistance to change. As any new technologies come into your area of expertise, you tend to be naturally challenged. OT professionals don’t want to change the established processes because they’ve been working very well so far. And one last fear is the concern about job losses. People are not really happy about automation when they see it as a challenge to their jobs.

These are legitimate, important concerns. But most of them are actually solvable as long as the right framework is put in place: cybersecurity, upskilling to new skills, etc. At the end of the day, it’s about the people. I think if you want to go beyond those challenges, you have to bring the right people to the table and talk about common goals in order for them to move forward with business opportunities for the manufacturing environment.

TR: Who are the people you have to get at that table? And how do you get them all to speak the same language, metaphorically?

FS: They do speak completely different languages.  You have the shop floor, which is the OT people, you have the top floor, which is the business people, you have the IT teams, and you have cybersecurity.  You really need a combination of all of them. We’ve seen that a lot of new technologies are driven by the CIO organizations. But the OT side of things is looking at it not from a technology perspective, but more from how it will  help improve operational efficiency, reduce downtime or reduce waste.  Those are two different mindsets, different KPIs, different ways of thinking. The top floor is also looking at it from a data privacy and security perspective. Most of our customers right now are driven by security. And we find that cybersecurity is an important component that actually helps bring people together, because manufacturing is the number one victim of cyber extortion today, and it is increasing year over year by about 25%. According to our latest temperature read of the industry, the US had the highest number of OT-targeted attacks globally, accounting for 49% of all such incidents.  It’s very important to have this moment of, “Let’s step back, understand what our security vulnerabilities are first. How do we make sure that we have the visibility that is needed to detect and respond to those risks”.  And just having that conversation leads to other topics aligning to the same goals. We really see cybersecurity as the way to bring everybody together at the same table. Cybersecurity is the one language that they all speak.

TR: How else do you help different groups within companies align to the same goals?

FS: It is very important to foster collaboration between them. To really have a good feel for the other, IT needs to spend a day within the factory, and OT needs to spend a day in the life of the IT team. One of the best practices that we’ve seen with our customers is to create a designated, amalgamated team with resources from the factory side, from the IT side, from the security side, and from the top floor as well. The goal is to break down the silos and help bridge that gap to further the business within the manufacturing environment.  At the end of the day, embracing a new technology can only scale when you have all those people working together.

TR: What types of manufacturing verticals do you think are more advanced in this process, and which ones have further to go?

FS: Verticals like aviation and automotive are ahead of the game, as are high-tech consumer goods. The ones that are not as mature are folks like the food and beverage industry and Oil Gas & Mining. It’s about maturity of the industry, and one of the first questions I ask my customers is “At what stage are you in your industrial digital transformation?” We do see some verticals that are much more advanced in the way they approach the adoption of new technologies. This is because they are capable of looking at technology not in a siloed way, but how it interconnects with other technologies and processes.

An aviation customer of ours has been embracing new technologies in the manufacturing environment in their warehouses for about five to six years.  Their strategy was to combine private 5G networks with edge computing for the specific use case of automated guided vehicles. But then they found they could combine that also with industrial IoT, which is an important innovation in manufacturing. Having sensors everywhere, collecting data, and then being able to correlate that with other sets of data can enable real-time decisions like predictive maintenance. Now that same aviation customer has started talking about AI.  When you combine all of those technologies, you come up with a force multiplier for OT to truly embrace innovation. And that is why they’ve been able to move forward faster than other verticals.

TR: What are the risks of getting this process wrong?

FS: The number one thing is unplanned downtime.  People completely stress out about that from a factory perspective. Unsecured OT systems are also a very important one. Being hacked because there is a vulnerability in your OT production environment is a critical risk that manufacturers need to think about if they haven’t already. Another is delayed insights. There is an enormous amount of data in those factories that could and should be leveraged to make real-time decisions such as predictive maintenance.

TR: What do you see motivating companies to make this a priority?

FS: Sometimes you need a compelling event, unfortunately, that drives you to embrace those new technologies and bring everybody together.

One of our customers is a German manufacturer of consumer goods with a niche technology that needs to be protected.  They are the type of customer that typically get targeted in a cyberattack. When we went in there and talked about some of the things that they may want to be aware of from a cybersecurity perspective, it was kind of an “oh wow” moment where they realized they should inspect what they have and put some tools in place to have more visibility so they can detect issues and respond.  We went through an entire journey of putting together a solution that is both cybersecurity- and infrastructure-driven. It is all about building a secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure within the OT environment. However, they didn’t decide to implement the plan until one day, one of their factories had an impactful outage, and that completely changed the way that they were thinking about it. The organization implemented a new topology, a new infrastructure with secure additional tools within their production environment.

Another example is a consumer goods company had a switch go down. They lost millions of dollars a day for three days, which triggered a conversation about refreshing their entire infrastructure.  Otherwise, the same issue may happen again, because yes those issues come back, and they come back harder and harder. There’s a huge financial risk. It can’t be about fixing just one domino, in this case that switch, but the entire row of dominos that sit alongside it.

TR: You mentioned AI becoming a topic in the manufacturing world.  At what stage are they at, and in what contexts is it showing up in practice?

FS: Actually, AI in some forms already exists in the manufacturing space. For example, we’ve seen customers adopting computer vision to detect defects on some products. Typically, there is a team for that, and the pace at which those defects are detected is very, very important because it cannot be spread out across many hours of production. A camera on top of the assembly line uses computing power to process the images and to detect things that are not usual in the pattern of those products. AI is already used with an algorithm to treat that data.

The future is so wide, and AI is so nebulous, but it all comes down to having the right data. Once you can correlate the different types of data that you have from a manufacturing perspective, then you will be able to leverage more AI. We can see some new use cases coming up that leverage GenAI. Imagine you go into a factory, and you ask for the number of defective products in the last three hours or the last three days.  If the data is available, then AI is capable of providing insights in real time, enabling you to make real-time decisions. GenAI can help get that information faster, which is important because at the end of the day it’s all about financials and reducing downtime.  I think AI is going to revolutionize the manufacturing environment, and we’re going to see more of those use cases coming to fruition as long as you have the right data governance and structure within your environment.

TR: How does Orange Business view its role in driving adoption of next generation technologies in manufacturing?

FS: One of the things that has driven me to work for Orange Business is the proximity to the client.  We are very much driven by the people. We try to be the moderator between IT and OT, to help connect hybrid physical/software worlds.  Our expertise as an integrator is pivotal in that. There’s no way you can address all the problems and challenges you have within the manufacturing world yourself. The right partnerships, matched with the right tools and products within the right solution solves the problems. We focus on helping multinational customers, not only the big, global organizations, but also the mid-market.  We look at this through four strategic areas: employee experience, customer experience, operational experience, and what all of them require: a digital, secure, and scalable infrastructure.

TR: Thank you for talking with Telecom Ramblings!

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Industry Spotlight · Managed Services · SDN