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Part 1: 'We are focused on creating a separate entity'

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Soma Tah
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DirkDumortier e

Krishna Mukherjee

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Post its separation from big brother Alcatel-Lucent (as the carrier division was acquired by Nokia), Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE) had set out its own journey, with key focus on SMBs and a plethora of enterprise solutions. Today, the entity works with over 85 SMBs and plans to add more to its kitty. In a chit chat with CIOL, Dirk Dumortier, VP-Sales Enablement, APAC, ALE, and Prasath Rao – Territory Manager- India, ALE, tell more about its rosy roadmap.

Post Nokia’s acquisition of Alcatel Lucent’s carrier division, how has been the journey for ALE? Which were some of the key focus areas for ALE?

Prasath Rao: So, we had to set up our R&D offices and global support offices and that was the initial focus, but from sales publive-image

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perspective, I do not think that there was any change at all and we continued growing. It was constant and un-phased. Typically, we have two businesses- SMB and projects with large verticals and government business. What we are doing today is looking more at the SMB side. In the SMB side, we added a new distributor who comes from the SMB market itself and then we got into adding a lot of partners which helped us to expand our SMB portfolio. On the verticals side, we have been focusing on some key verticals like: hospitality, transport and the government. Last year, we added a dimension of healthcare, so it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the second half was quiet good for us in terms of healthcare. So, we did grow in terms of revenue as well added to the business be it in the new verticals or in SMB business. That is from the India perspective.

Dirk Dumortier: If we look at what happened last year, we became a separate entity and we have focused in creating that entity and laid more focus on the internal factors. Sales existed. But by having that much needed internal focus we have repositioned the complete organization. The organization went through a transition based on the elements like what do we want to do? How do we want to bring about the change in the external? We had started all the developments and all that we wanted to do in a new way.

So, have the transition and acquisitions yielded results?

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Dirk Dumortier: No, it is not acquisitions purely. It is based on finding our independence. It is based on our finding our identity – who are we? In the past we have been part of Alcatel-Lucent, our big brother, so who are we if we take ourselves out of the group? So, we tried to address internal questions of who are we and what do we want to be? We found solutions to it. In terms of identity, it is helping us in the transformation of the digital part. And to achieve that we are going to focus on verticals. We are also going to focus on the hybrid and cloud solution areas. And will try to complete the solution kit by offering services. 2016 was majorly for creating the identity and starting the project developments. We are rolling out products for the SMB. Organization wise we are ready for what comes next. We will have more products developed this year also we will have sales directed to it in the next year. That’s what our big picture for the organization looks like.

Prasath Rao: For us, when we speak about big revenue it always comes from the large verticals i.e. the metro, government, defense etc. what is very important for us apart from them is SMBs. SMBs gives us the mileage, makes our presence felt and makes noise for us. They also act as the local point of contact for the large leads. That way, in terms of importance SMB plays an extremely important part. In terms of revenue, the large verticals will have a major share. But SMB cannot be taken lightly since SMB propels our growth and gets us larger leads.

What kind of technology solutions are you providing? Could you please elaborate?

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Prasath Rao: It starts with the network foundation which keeps switches. There are four core switches--LAN switches, the routers, the Wireless LAN switches for city surveillance, then the communication part which is your telephoning. The higher layer is of the cloud depending on the kind of infrastructure our customer requires. Also, it is based on the need such as onsite off site and hybrid cloud model that’s where we come in. To put it simply: telephone, network, routing, and wireless access.

Dirk Dumortier: We are coming out with hybrid connection system. Some parts are in office, and some parts are in the cloud. It is about controlling. The social tools you use, as a company you are working at, they store some data and when you move on from the company and work for a competitor your information is left behind. Is that what you want from an organization? I don’t think so. Our hybrid solution is company contained. We are giving you a roadmap for a full digital transformation, so that even when an employee leaves, he has his data intact. And we make it a very simple thing to install.

Talking about OPSO connects—It is a product suite that we have developed. It is much more than the nodal thing we have in the middle. It is connected with the solution in the cloud. It is very similar to what WhatsApp or Skype are doing. By providing that combination you create a very flexible solution controlled by the organization that’s where you are at. In the underlying elements you have LAN and Wi-Fi, and the technology but with the guest access and BYOD access. The simplicity to install, everything is there so that an existing PBX reseller is able to transit into a transformation package. That’s the idea. Expanding a little bit, I will take OPSO connect to the part in the cloud, our application called rainbow, you can go to apps store and download the news via our app.

Read Part 2 of the interview here...

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