Alcatel-Lucent focuses on the ?Dynamic Enterprise? era that will look at creating transformation advantage for its enterprise customers. CNME has a first hand look at the roadmap.
The Dynamic Enterprise is all about enabling forward thinking organisations to both address a major opportunity that stares them in the face and also use this as a tool to overcome challenges. With Web 2.0, enabling a surge of communications through unique forms of convergence can be the competitive advantage that companies have been on the look out for.
?This phase of transformation represents the single largest challenge and opportunity that the industry has faced,? according to Steven Shepard, Founder of Shepard Communication Group.This is the opportunity that Alcatel wants to work on with its enterprise customers on.
Pat Russo CEO of Alcatel Lucent
Bringing the pieces together
In helping to create transformation advantage, Alcatel-Lucent hopes to carve itself a big piece of the enterprise market. A fairly new, yet fast growing segment for the traditionally telecom and service provider focused player, growing this segment has been identified as a major focus for the company.?We are clearly growing our enterprise business and increased both sales and marketing investments. We have been strong in customer acquisitions both in the data as well as call centre market. Now we have also entered the high growth markets ? mobility and security,? said Pat Russo, Chief Executive Officer of Alcatel-Lucent.With over 275,000 customers globally, Alcatel-Lucent sees the enterprise business as a strong component of future growth.
?We?ve seen a 9% increase in revenues YoY and an 8% jump in operating margins thanks to the enterprise business. We also outgrew the market in the contact centre, data, services and enterprise equipment sales to carriers,? Russo added.The key areas marked for investment and focus in 2008 include fixed and mobile broadband, investing in security, virtualisation and SOA, making the most of innovation from Bell Labs, initiate key organisational changes, greater business alignment and create more synergies between the business areas.
Built for change
According to Russo, working with Alcatel-Lucent will prepare customers for industry changes well ahead of time. ?Organisations need to be built for change. Today are there over one billion computers in use, three billion cell phones in us and two billion next generation handhelds. The world is hurtling towards being always on and communication is accelerating the pace of change,? she said.With this in perspective, Alcatel-Lucent is realigning its focus to enable its customers to look at people, process, nature of work and knowledge workers and enable customers to share, harvest and leverage the corporate knowledge and intelligence in real-time.
Do you know how much you know?
If we all knew how much we know, then the world would be a different place. This is the strategy behind Alcatel-Lucent?s focus on the 10 C?s ? collaboration, content, context, continuity, convergence, customisation, community, consistency, connectivity and control. ?Information needs to be available, trusted and evolved and Alcatel-Lucent is investing in Transformation Advantage as an overarching strategy,? Russo said.This strategy would look at areas like content and applications to enable the flow of knowledge, always-on broadband, the network transformation to IP and service platforms (service orchestration, Web 2.0 and virtualisation). ?IP is clearly the lingua franca of the digital age,? she emphasised.
?Enterpise 2.0 has got the nod thanks to the popularity of the Web 2.0, which is now a moniker for collaboration. Our roadmap is heading towards collaboration and enabling customers to manage it,? Russo shared.
Tom Burns, COO, Alcatel Lucent Enterprise Business Group
The four elements of knowledge
According to Alcatel-Lucent?s CEO of the Enterprise Business Group Tom Burns leveraging knowledge boils down to collaborating with people, partners and customers. ?The route to extract enterprise knowledge is through data, voice, video and presence technologies, which when put together will replace even the e-mail as a communication medium,? Burns said.The technology major?s transformation solutions will therefore focus on driving the create of mobile workforces, enabling new generation work places, enabling new styles of working, Web 2.0 services and setting new mandates for CIOs.?The challenges for CIO include keeping with the rising expectations of people within and connected to the organisation, dealing with the increase complexity that technology brings and improving performance. At the same time, the assets in an enterprise are the network, people, process and organisations knowledge,? Burns said.To target all the four assets, Alcatel-Lucent has a four pronged plan:
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