Alcatel-Lucent’s (ALU) new CEO Ben Verwaayen in December announced a new focus for the company. A key part of that has to do with helping service providers find their way in the Web 2.0 world, which to date has seen over-the-top providers like Google ruling the roost. The idea, ALU says, is to help these network owners monetize their assets by creating ecosystems and positioning telcos and other network owners as the touchstones within those ecosystems. xchange Editor in Chief Paula Bernier recently spoke with Alcatel-Lucent CMO Tim Krause about this vision.
xchange: What did Alcatel-Lucent announce recently around helping carriers address over-the-top applications and application development?
Krause: “In short, it was basically an announcement that said we are going to direct our R&D efforts at our company toward four key technology areas. In terms of how you just asked the question, the heart of it is essentially bringing [together] the trusted services that you can get from a network to the creative innovation that comes out of the Web and over-the-top players so we can open up the value proposition to begin to connect billions of Web sites to millions of subscribers. I don’t know a shorter way, really, to say that.”
xchange: Did Alcatel-Lucent announce specific new gear or software around this application/ecosystem effort or is this purely a strategy announcement?
Krause: “We didn’t announce any new products or solutions on Friday, [Dec. 12]. We talked about products and application platforms that we already have or are coming out with over the next few weeks and months across our portfolio that apply to this strategy. So there are some proof points that exist for the company today, but it’s at the beginning. And [Ben] really was, as you said, announcing ‘This is the direction I’m taking the company.’”
xchange: What are those existing Alcatel-Lucent products that tie into this strategy?
Krause: “We have elements of capability across the portfolio. In our IP routing portfolio, we have programmability and flexibility around the assignment of quality and bandwidth and an awareness of the application or service that’s running over the network that applies to the strategy. And even all the way down to the optical domain, where you think it has nothing to do with anything, we have programmability there in terms of the assignment of bandwidth and the direction of capacity around the network that would allow an operator to very quickly and seamlessly allow bandwidth to be moved around to serve an application like this.”
xchange: What about products around service creation, like next-generation service development/delivery platforms (SDP)?
Krause: “Yes. In really the application space itself, one of the notable things that Ben has done to launch the strategy is he took our software businesses, which have been distributed around the company in the past, and put them together into one application software group. He puts all the assets together there. That’s our application platforms that we use in the service provider space where we have platforms that provide subscriber data management, micropayment, voice over IP, our entire IMS platform portfolio, together with application platforms that we’ve been building for enterprise where we do the unified communications enablement, where we have our Genesis contact center platform.
