Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise held their Connex18 event this week in Latvia, bringing analysts together from around the globe to explore where the business is headed with it’s roadmap for digital transformation.
ALE currently serves more than 830,000 customers around the world under the brand of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, and with the help of their partners, they design award-winning strategies to simplify the way companies manage people, customer service, and processes. To learn more about the future of ALE, we attended CEO Jack Chen’s keynote speech on Vision 2020 at the event in Riga.
How ALE is Introducing Tomorrow’s Technology Today
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise have always had a passion for next-level technology. They claim that their goal in business is to help their customers compete in a digital world, and there’s never been a time when that’s more relevant. In this age of digital transformation, Jack Chen began his speech by addressing the changing nature of our world. Thanks to the arrival of artificial intelligence, IoT, and even virtual reality, the way we live, and work is brand-new.
“Digital transformation is happening at an accelerated rate, changing the industry as we know it. This drive towards the future, is combining with an increased focus on customer experience.”
For Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, the future of technology is all about giving people the experiences they want and need in a time where new opportunities are emerging constantly. The barriers to communication are shifting, and ALE want to be on the cutting edge.
What is the ALE Strategy?
Jack noted that Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is moving, like many businesses today, into the world of “X-as-a-service”. Going forward, their combination of OTEC, Rainbow technology, and hardware of the UC world will all be key points in how ALE plan to compete in the industry.
Already, ALE have seen significant success with their Rainbow UCaaS solution, which opens the door to new collaboration services to users from every background, regardless of what their existing communication strategy might look like. Rainbow gives customers a “hybrid” way to enter the cloud, which is something else that appears on the ALE roadmap for the future.
Rainbow’s position as a CPaaS strategy allows customers to integrate unique tools into their portfolio depending on what they need. This highlights ALE’s focus on a more customer-centric business in the future.
“We’re focusing very much on the use case of every industry, starting with the pain points of each sector. It’s about finding out what value each feature can really deliver to the customer.”
According to Jack, if you can understand the pain point for your customer from day one, then you can give them the service they really want, not just a one-size-fits-all strategy.
“This is the way we work, building our roadmap from the customer pain point, through user experience.”
ALE and Digitally-Transforming Vertical Markets
In the years ahead, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will be looking at delivering new types of disruptive technology to the verticals that shape their business, including:
- Government
- Hospitality
- Healthcare
- Education
- Transportation
In his speech, Jack noted that the main point of focus for the company in the years to come, will be on making complex technology simple for every marketplace.
“It all starts with a focus on the customer. In the education side, for instance, we’re looking at finding unique and simplified solutions for learning in the teacher and student community.”
Learning from real case-study scenarios as they go, ALE believes that a standard feature set is no longer the way to differentiate yourself in a competitive industry.
“By building off pain points, we can deliver the unique solutions that each customer needs.”
Business Progress and Go to Market
Chen noted that during 2017, the company realised that it needed to start changing the way it went to market. This is something that we saw evidence of last year, when the company appointed Lisa Simpson, formerly with Nokia, as the vice president for their channel and distribution strategy in North America.
Lisa was brought onto the team to drive growth for the channel by expanding the reseller and distributor base and developing additional opportunities to support partners in all the key channels mentioned above. When she began working with ALE, Lisa acknowledged that the plan for 2018 is to make sure that 80% of the business was moving through the channel.
Already, ALE have seen significant progress in their effort to become a major player in the unified communication and technology industries. They have 15% more success in their chosen verticals, an extra 1000+ customers using Rainbow, and another 1000+ partners on Rainbow too.
On top of that, the company has seen 235k cloud seats on the Rainbow platform, along with many new partners recruited.
Vision 2020
Jack Chen painted his dream of the future by saying that throughout the next three to five years, he hopes that Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will have completely transformed their business strategy using the UCaaS platform:
“We’ll be continuing to focus on the channel network, the cloud, and mobility.”
In the long-term, the target is to become a true contender in the CPaaS and IoT network space.
“Reaching our goal will take a lot of work, but our plain is laid out, and it’s already in motion. Our vision will guide us through the next three to five years, and maybe onto the next ten years if we remain persistent towards our goals.”
As the Internet of Things gets more well-deserved attention in the education, transport and healthcare sectors, among others, it’s no wonder this is where ALE has chosen to focus much of their attention.
“We’re not going to be changing our direction or strategy anytime soon.”
Looking Forward to 2019
With the future firmly in his sights, Jack ended his speech by saying that this time next year, ALE would hopefully be celebrating a host of new achievements.
“I can tell you that our dream is helping this company to live for another 100 years – all the way to 2119, even if I’m not personally around to celebrate that.”
With a continued focus on their high-growth areas of CPaaS and IoT, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise have set the tone for the future with a “live longer, live strong campaign.” Everything they do today is yet another step towards the future.
