Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise by Blair Pleasant
At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALUE) analyst conference in Annapolis, MD, we got to see not only the US Naval Academy and John Paul Jones’ tomb (??), but we also got to hear about many of the changes ALUE is experiencing, and the company’s vision for the future. There was a lot of discussion about the transformation that ALUE is experiencing. Two of the big changes I’ll cover here are the accelerated move to the cloud, and ALUE’s new contact center partner and products.
A lot of time was spent discussing ALUE’s cloud offers and strategy – some of which is NDA and will have to wait for another time. The company wants to be a “cloud enabler,” enabling an ecosystem of partners to transition to the cloud. It created segmented offerings, taking into account the diversity of its partners, in order for the partners to take a position in the cloud.
The new OpenTouch Suite for Cloud includes three different offerings:
- Enterprise Cloud – a UCaaS offering for mid and large enterprises, based on OmniPCX Enterprise (OXE),
- Office Cloud – UCaaS targeting SMEs, based on ALUE’s OmniPCX Office (OXO), and
- Personal Cloud – an application as a service, targeting communities of users across enterprises. This will be deployed as an overlay to existing infrastructure, and will be delivered in September 2013.
The Enterprise Cloud, which is currently available to partners and customers (through service provider partners), is based on OpenTouch, the same technology used for ALUE’s on-premises deployment, and the OpenTouch Conversation client. Using the familiar OpenTouch and the same management tools means that partners who already use and know OpenTouch for on-premise deployments will have an easier time ramping up the learning curve, and can get to market faster. The service is delivered as a software suite, and is hardware agnostic, which means that partners don't have to invest in proprietary hardware and can use any server. It uses a virtualized, multi-single tenant version of OpenTouch, so that every customer has its own instance.
The service is sold on a consumption-based model, with what ALUE calls “Elastic Licensing,” which allows customers to add or decrease the number of licenses used whenever they want, and just pay for the licenses they consume.
ALUE is engaged with a number of major service providers worldwide for its Enterprise UCaaS service, and is working with Value Added Distributors (VADs) for the Office Cloud service.
One of these VADs is ICON Voice Networks USA, ALUE’s value-added distributor in North America. In addition to being a master distributor for ALUE, ICON is the first OpenTouch hosting company in North America. Partners can deploy and white label the service from ICON, making it easy for them to get to market and sell the service to customers.
I had a chance to spend some time with Kevin Kelleher, CEO, and David Carissimi, COO, and they are excited – I mean really, really excited – about working with ALUE, for both on-premise and cloud solutions. They said that ICON grew 20% last year based on their relationship with ALUE, and expect 35% growth based on the new cloud offering. They added 16 new VARs this quarter, mainly based on the OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud service.
ICON chose ALUE as a business partner for several reasons, including the company’s corporate culture. David explained that ALUE “Operates with a small business mindset. I never hear the word ‘no’ – it’s always ‘let’s look at it.’” He also emphasized the fact that “Unlike others, ALUE isn’t competing against the business partner for the business. They’re not proposing to the same customer and selling the product for lower rate and expecting the channel partner to do the deployment.” Kevin and David explained that ALUE offers customer choices – a choice of OPEX or CAPEX, deployment architecture, device, conversation, applications, etc.
Moving to another topic, one of the other big changes at ALUE is in the contact center area. ALUE is still partnering with Genesys, and will continue to resell Genesys to customers that want to upgrade or add on to their existing systems. Partners can and will still sell Genesys. However, going forward, the push will be toward the new OpenTouch Customer Service Portfolio, based on Altitude Technology software. The two companies will co-develop additional differentiators to add on top of Altitude’s existing solution. ALUE is creating different modules for OpenTouch Customer Service to deliver unified interaction management solutions that are open, deploy rapidly, and can be delivered as a product or service. The modules include Design Studio, Integration Server, Connectors, Voice portal, Unified Dialer, Unified Interaction (to support voice, web chat, email, fax, SMS, MMS, and social media), Unified Desktop, and more. The solution is cloud ready, meaning it is fully virtualized and VMware compliant. In addition, it supports multiple PBXs, and will support Lync 2013 in the near future.
When asked to describe how ALUE will differentiate itself in the contact center area, Stan Corporeau, Product Marketing Director, and Philippe Bletterie, Product Line Marketing Director, noted that there will be a tight integration between OpenTouch Customer Service and OpenTouch in the enterprise, enabling contact center agents to see the presence status of people outside of the contact center, making it possible to “extend conversations.” ALUE is bullish on the idea of going beyond the traditional contact center boundaries and integrating the contact center into the enterprise. Altitude is also bullish on this concept. In fact, Altitude Product Marketing Manager Teresa José and I presented together on a panel at IT Expo about this very topic, and Teresa gave some great examples of Altitude customers that have done this successfully.
ALUE selected Altitude because they were looking for a partner interested in doing joint development, and “working together to be partners with skin in the game.” The companies have invested jointly to make the partnership a success, with ALUE helping to influence Altitude’s roadmap and development. While both companies are naturally optimistic about the new relationship, the proof will be in the results in terms of product development and innovation, sales, and both partner and customer satisfaction. It will take some time to transition ALUE’s channel partners to the new product, and some may resist making the change since they’ve invested a lot of time and effort on the Genesys products. Partners will be incentivized to sell the new solution, but there will always be some holdouts that want to stick with what they are comfortable with. There are some capabilities that Genesys offers that are not currently available on the Altitude product, such as a mobile application, and the companies will need to work together to release a mobile offering in the near future.
Altitude and ALUE seem to have a very good relationship and are working well together, with lots of development plans in the works. Several of ALUE’s partners were already Altitude’s partners and therefore got trained and ready to sell the joint solutions. In addition, ALUE put together a plan to support and act “on-behalf” of its partners when needed during the ramp-up period. As a result, they have already dozens of potential deals in the pipe with motivated partners.
2012 has definitely been a year of transition for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. With a new CEO at the helm of ALU corporate, expect to see more changes ahead.