Computer Vision — Orange Business
Product strategy and partner development · Industrial pilots
The starting point
This internal corporate startup had spent roughly two years developing face-recognition technology without making sales. Leadership and the commercial organization, including sales, supported closing it.
I took over at that point to determine whether the technology could solve a commercially worthwhile problem and whether the investment could still be recovered.
Focus on industrial problems that video analytics could solve.
What I did
- Assessed the market and technology I researched use cases, segments, competitors and unit economics. The analysis indicated that an offer built only on the in-house face-recognition core would not be competitive enough. I evaluated partner platforms on licensing, deployment, detector integration and support.
- Developed a partner-based offer I built a partner-platform strategy combining mature video analytics with Orange’s cloud, connectivity and managed services, plus specialist computer-vision expertise. The portfolio grew beyond recognition into industrial and operational use cases.
- Defined how detections would be used The work covered mining safety, personal protective equipment checks, manufacturing tracking and vessel operations. In one maritime scenario, helmet and life-jacket detection were considered alongside door status and access logic. The product question was what decision a detection should trigger, beyond whether a model could spot an object.
- Tested the approach through pilots I linked the partners, investment work, presales and pilot development. Not every opportunity deserved more funding; one manufacturing concept stopped because the customer didn’t accept the business case.
The outcome
The internal startup moved from a supported closure decision to renewed investment in four months and its first industrial pilot in six months. The new offer used a partner-based cloud platform.
The work reached pilots, not commercial scale. External disruption in February 2022 halted sales development. Specialist teams developed the models; revenue and safety improvements were not established.