Enovacom Bought by Orange, but Still No Plan for US Market Entry

Global enterprise firm Orange Business Services strengthened its healthcare portfolio today, announcing that it had purchased the health data management company Enovacom. The new property will be attached to the Orange Healthcare division, which launched in 2016.

“By joining forces with Orange Healthcare, Enovacom's customers will benefit from the Orange Group’s wide-ranging skills and capacity to innovate in cloud computing, communication infrastructure, security, connected objects and customer experience,” Enovacom’s chief executive Laurent Frigara said in a statement. “I am overjoyed that through this deal, Enovacom will continue to grow with respect for, and in the interest of, its employees.”

Both companies are based in France but operate globally. While the move may help Orange “move up the value chain” in its healthcare offerings and provide its new subsidiary latitude to innovate and expand, it may not yield the US market entry that Enovacom once promised, though it already operates in Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and the UK.

It manages health data for thousands of European hospitals, emphasizing interoperability and touting a solution that integrates data from biomedical devices into health records. In 2017, it announced that it had secured the right to deploy its health data integration solutions “in every healthcare facility in Montreal.”

Despite success in some markets, and now the backing of a global business giant, Enovacom has yet to access the US health data market it once coveted. In 2014, it declared that it would become a “pure player in the US healthcare IT market.” The company announced the opening of a California office, and added that it would be hosting a booth at the annual HIMSS meeting that year, the annual North American health IT mega-conference.

That US office, which was to be based in Mountain View, California, may not have materialized. No searches of the area reveal Enovacom operations in the city or state. A spokesperson for Orange told Healthcare Analytics News™ that, according to Orange Healthcare CEO Elie Lobel, Enovacom does not currently have US operations “and it is not anticipated in the short term to develop a sales presence in the US.”

The company has continued to exhibit each year at HIMSS, however, with an eye towards expansion.

“The annual HIMSS conference represents an opportunity to build contacts with hospitals and potential partners in North America, but also in areas such as Asia,” Frigara said in a 2016 press release. In 2017, a newspaper in Enovacom’s hometown of Marseille detailed the company’s enduring international ambitions, adding that it was the only French company to exhibit at the conference that year. It will again have a booth at the 2018 exhibit next month in Las Vegas, as well.

The company’s North American focus, for now, appears to be on the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec (where it has its North American headquarters).