Orange Business Services announced Tuesday the launch of Service Manage-Watch. The new solution, aimed at enterprise IT departments, monitors network services and applications and uses artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive analysis to monitor potential problems. Service Manage-Watch (or Watch for short) was developed to answer enterprise needs to monitor interconnected IT services, said the company. "Monitoring and measuring, however, are increasingly complex as IT estates expand, potentially resulting in lack of global visibility to identify root causes of issues or recurring glitches, inability to anticipate incidents, and poor alert management. Traditional monitoring tools take a siloed approach based on one tool per service, proving inadequate for today's distributed infrastructure," said Orange Business Services.

Chatbots have established themselves in the customer service industry, replacing human agents in contact centers with automated responses to customer inquiries and freeing up human workers to perform more complex tasks, but their potential for other areas is now wider in scale as more real-world use cases are tested and proven. Contextual real-time communication and collaboration within the workflow is the next step. Richard Heaps, Head of Product Management for UC&C at Orange Business Services says, "CPaaS is a perfect mechanism for enhancing the user experience and for taking UC&C tools to the next level. It offers a big advantage in providing communication at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way that users want to receive it. Today's workplaces are about communication and collaboration, bringing people together, talking and resolving problems. CPaaS now enables us to embed a communications and collaboration tool in an existing app, making that communication more targeted and relevant, more specific to the issue you're already talking about."

The key role of enterprise services in Orange's plans for growth was spelled out clearly by Orange Group's Chairman and CEO, Stéphane Richard, when he presented the Group's five-year strategy, Engage2025, in Paris in early December. He said, "The enterprise market is changing profoundly to become data-driven, multi-cloud based and end-to-end cybersecurity…more than ever we believe in convergence of the technical and IT business, and we intend to accelerate the transformation of the B2B business. "The best proof of IT convergence is the skyrocketing demand for virtualised and on-demand services such as SD-WAN. We have a clear edge over conventional digital services companies in that we have the IT know-how. We are prepared for the challenges…of creating the right partnerships and automating and digitising the processes with the benefits of data analytics and AI". Multiservice integration services (MSI) are one of the areas in which Orange Business Services has invested heavily to gain that edge, a claim supported by testimony from Gartner and more importantly, from its customer Sony. In July, Sony Group announced it had chosen Orange Business Services to consolidate and transform the communications infrastructure of its two largest operating companies, starting with a harmonised network to improve user experience globally. Orange will be Sony's principal global provider, delivering a fully automated, intelligent network for all global business units over time. The solution will be built on Orange's Flexible SD-WAN and will connect more than 500 locations in over 50 countries across five continents. The plan is to deliver better performance, security and scalability. "Orange innovation, integration capabilities and international network are the catalysts that will allow us for the first time to bring our regional operating companies under one umbrella," said Makoto Toyoda, Chief Information Officer, Sony Group. "Only Orange could deliver a platform with the scale and scope to cover all the moving pieces of our international business.

There are increasing calls for government oversight of artificial intelligence development. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to have a huge and positive impact on our world – but, it also brings with it complex issues that we have never had to face as a society before. AI sounds alarm bells for some people, who are frightened that AI will bring about a real threat to humanity, learning our worst traits, intensifying inequalities and triggering weapons of mass destruction. Others believe AI will take people's jobs and discriminate against the vulnerable in society. Kevin Kelly, author and founder executive editor of Wired believes these anxieties are deep rooted because they link our intelligence to our identity, but that they can be overcome.

The technology industry A-list is rushing to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Even the White House is in on the act having developed an open-sourced Facebook chatbot that lets you speak to the President.