In 2012, Alcatel-Lucent is repositioning its enterprise business unit with new leadership and new focus. The new enterprise unit no long carries the legacy of its Genesys call center unit which was officially sold off at end of January.
At the helm of the enterprise unit is its new President Michel Emelianoff, who officially took the reins on February 1. With the removal of Genesys, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will focused on unified communications and switching.
“We see an acceleration of certain trends in the market where we can leverage more of our assets,” Emelianoff told InternetNews.com. “For one, we clearly see an evolution towards cloud based solutions and we see more enterprise customers looking to benefit from unified communications in a different manner than just Capex type of transactions.”
Emelianoff noted that Alcatel-Lucent has both the communications assets as well as networking components required for cloud deployments. The larger Alcatel-Lucent organization also has a new effort called CloudBand, working with carriers to help build a cloud orchestration layer as well.
Alcatel-Lucent is facing an uphill battle in the race for enterprise networking market share. It’s a very competitive market that includes Cisco, HP Networking, Brocade and Juniper among others.
In an effort to gain share against rivals, Emelianoff has a simple plan: become part of the conversation. In his view, Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise business has had a problem being part of the initial conversation with enterprises when the time comes to evaluate networking gear.
“We need to be way more present in the early stage of the decision cycle,” Emelianoff said.
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Alcatel-Lucent’s New Enterprise Direction
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
