India is a price-sensitive mkt: Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent sees 20 p.c growth in India by 2015

India is a price-sensitive mkt: Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent could be a well-known name for the global market, but is just one among many other names for the Indian market! Post the restructuring involving Genesys, the company is looking at getting back its stronghold in the India market with new strategy, partners and targets

Friday, June 10, 2011

Speaking to Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, Michael McBrien, senior vice president, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, APAC, shared his plans for the market, the opportunities and challenges forward.

Michael McBrien is the Leader of Enterprise Sales for Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia Pacific Region, with overall responsibility for enterprise customer activities, including sales, channel management, delivery and customer satisfaction.

This time the performance of APAC was quiet impressive compared to the rest of the world. How significant was the contribution from India market for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise?

Michael: Absolutely, we saw a positive growth from APAC region (about 20 per cent). This was driven by various markets like China and India. About India, we have a lot of expectation from India especially from both enterprise and carrier aspect. It is a booming market and with 3G, and SWAN projects, we are hopeful about the growth.

Among our three offerings namely communication, network and Genesys, network has been the best-selling, but now our team is focused at building a team for Genesys for the local market as well. Over the next few years, we plan to increase our direct touch points and work closely with our partners.

I look forward to working with partners from across the region, and for Genesys to advance their contact centers and improve the level of service they deliver to their customers.

India has got a huge telecom market, with 13-15 telecom service providers, but apart from this, what other verticals you are targeting for your portfolio in India?

Michael: We have two large managed services contracts with Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications. But we do have clientèle in government, enterprise, education, hospitals, banks and civil defense, and Navy as well.

From telecom, we have also a few new contract for the network and Genesys business. We see a lot of opportunity in strategic industries, from network infrastructure, and partners. India is a price-sensitive market, we have to work on a different model to penetrate here. The scale and price did not reap the expected benefits. Having said that we are quiet aggressive and optimistic as well.

You said that past few years have not witnessed the expected growth. What are the factors, and what is the new strategy forward?

Michael: We partnered with a few large partners; they fall under the creme-level IT companies in India. Given their scale and model, we were expecting this partnership to bring massive growth, but the opposite happened. The partner was offering support and business in global markets, and was not talking about the local market. We therefore had to re-look at our partner strategy.

We are now selecting smaller India-focused partners, keen at expanding our India business. It was a learning for us as we were too optimistic. So, 2009-10 did not go well, but things should start picking up from the second half of 2011. We would first establish the mid-size market and then go for larger contracts.

As I mentioned earlier, we are planning to look at Indian market from a different aspect. We have got big plans for Cloud, and SAAS offering, where the customers pay you for the use, increase our direct touch points.

Our solutions like OpenTouch, that is an open architecture – for the enterprises to use any Cisco or a Juniper, with a software layer and Genesys Endpoint – will take some time to build on the demand, but would not get into the price play. We do not sell cheap products, so we will build the right partner ecosystem accordingly.

Where do you see India market 3-5 years down the line? And what would be the growth factors?

Micheal: In my belief, entire APAC including India is the market for SAAS model, where companies would be ready to pay for the hosted model. On the flip side, we might see a decline in the software license revenue.

By 2015, we look forward to achieving 20-30 per cent growth with OpenTouch, architecture, carrier and hosted infrastructure. We have quiet a broad portfolio. Over the next few months, we will invest in establishing the team, getting the partners followed by partner training, identifying the markets and solution and evangelizing about our offering.

(The author was hosted by Alcatel Lucent in Singapore)

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