Alcatel Lucent: Journey towards new identity

BANGALORE, INDIA: Global telecommunications major Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise seems to be changing with time, and with its new message 'Change in Conversation', the company readies for an entirely new approach to the market.

Speaking to Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, chief marketing officer, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, gives a perspective of this change, the directions for the coming years. Nicolas brings more than 25 years of IT and telecommunications industry experience to his role. He is responsible for all the marketing programs supporting the enterprise portfolio including Genesys.

As a new CMO for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, how do you plan to shape the market strategy for Alcatel-Lucent? What do you expect people to perceive when they hear about the company?

Nicolas: So, the first thing that we want to do is to establish an identity for enterprise business, build the Alcatel Lucent Enterprise further. A lot of changes have happened over the past couple of years, from products and business side. Another reason is that Genesys has been operating strongly but in a niche market. IT is largely into customer service, with some features of communication and network.

We are in the process of rolling out Genesys for business with Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), educating partners and customers about how we can leverage on Genesys and value add to the portfolio.

Unfortunately, a lot of people perceived ALU as a service provider, so it was important to explicitly talk about how we serve enterprises. This could be because, in the past, ALU was not aggressive in developing its brand, so the focus is towards establishing Alcatel Lucent Enterprise and making people understand it.

We are changing the format by being more localized and regional. This also demonstrated our relationship with our customers and partners. They like us because we are approachable, focused; we are open and available to discussions about problems and challenges they are facing. We take full responsibility of the customer projects and keep innovating for new solutions.

Alcatel Lucent had a stronghold in switching and telecom equipment, but was playing a low-key role in the data center switching. Now you have new announcements and product launches around it. What was the idea behind it?

Nicolas: Data center comprises multiple components — storage, servers, security and more. We focus on two components namely data center switching and their interconnect. These are big problems for customers and play very well with our focus of switching products. It would not be true to say that we were not in data center at all. We received pretty decent chunk of business from data center but never talked about. What we recognized late last year, in particular when we launched our Omniswitch 10k, was that roughly 50 per cent of sales will be coming from data center.

Now, to be able to claim that we are also data center switching providers, we needed a bigger portfolio with Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6900. So with this launch (in July), we are now talking about it officially. So OmniSwitch 6900 in data center plays the role of rack switch. We also have other elements and an ongoing process of improving the products.

Alcatel Lucent now talks about 'Change the Conversation'. What is the underlying message that the company wants to deliver to partners and customers?

Nicolas:We see three fundamental evolution around social, mobile and video. These three factors are rapidly transforming how we communicate making it multi-body communication. With social it is multi-body, with mobile it is multi-device and with video it is multi-media, as we can add/remove participant and activate channels.

It is the founding principle for next-generation platforms. In the field of collaboration, a lot have been done in document sharing and messaging, but the true aspiration is to have people communicate on any platform, which has been largely un-addressed. We are trying to build a platform that enables the communication to become conversation.

Alcatel Lucent offers a host of solutions with its OpenTouch Suite like Federation Services solution. Could you elaborate more about it?

Nicolas: Federation Services solution enables consolidation of SIP trunking and dialing plans for multi-vendor PBX environments. It has three major features. A lot of enterprises have historically a lot of PBXs. So it would be common to see them stacking 2, 5, or even ten PBXs. At the same time, they do want to rip-and-replace these legacy systems. So what they are putting is PBXs in the data center and try to unify how they manage it to gain saving. One of the key elements to optimize the management is numbering plans. If you see, each of the PBXs has their numbers and you have to put them into tables, which is very tedious to optimize management. Federation is about building single numbering scheme and leveraging SIP to have this numbering scheme governed; how calls between different PBX are routed.

The second aspect is, a lot of companies are finding value in SIP trunking. Enterprises that are putting all PBXs in data center are now looking for consolidation by SIP trunking. Which means bringing all the SIP trunks in various sites, or consolidate all off-net traffic to single point and then letting them out.

Thirdly, today enterprises have to accommodate more and more mobile devices for their employees and the tone of the key concerns for them is the cost of the communication. It is easy for employees to take calls. One of the key features is that enterprises can control how mobile calls get routed and hence their costs.

How significant is the Asian market for the company?

Nicolas: The enterprise business confronted in late 2008-09 for a decline in revenue. This is a business that we managed very well for three years. We focus on growth and enjoy a significant growth in APAC. In my belief, in terms of recovery from the crisis in 2009, Asia has done the best. The growth has come from the middle class. Also we are reaping benefits from the investments in past towards developing the region and understanding the market.

You mentioned that Alcatel Lucent at one point of time was conceived as a service provider and the innovations happening give a B2C flavor. What is the overall direction?

Nicolas: I think the fact that Alcatel-Lucent is seen as service provider to the vendor is the reflection of our legacy and that fetches 80 per cent to Alcatel-Lucent enterprise revenue. It to some extent, is very natural for large enterprises that people construe them from the largest market they address to. Microsoft is known for Windows but they also sell X-box.

The legacy of Alcatel-Lucent has been strong in Europe, established in Latin America and North America, but not so established in Asia.

We basically are following industry trends. We are following three key directions. Firstly, private and domain WANs. Today we primarily serve market for large enterprises that require mission-critical networks and we are bringing the same capabilities for the small enterprises.

The second direction is bringing convergence between switching and storage. Our products are not only ready to be used in context of the same infrastructure for switching traffic between servers but also connecting storage. And the third element is optimizing the wireless infrastructure with wired infrastructure.

(The author was hosted by Alcatel Lucent in Singapore)