3 Hurdles for Alcatel-Lucent's Enterprise Play

Yet radical transformation is exactly what will be needed if Alcatel-Lucent is to succeed in the North American enterprise market. The company is fighting an image of late-mover, a point that Hubert de Pesquidoux, president of Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise business group, worked hard to dispel in his keynote. Pesquidoux hammered home how Alcatel-Lucent's holds or vies for market leadership in contact centers, voice, and even edge routing.

The company will push this leadership envelope this year by focusing on customer satisfaction. "Our competitors talk about unified communications in the sense of increased productivity, but in a survey with Bain and Company we found enterprises are most worried about customer satisfaction, said Oscar Rodriguez, the company's chief marketing officer, "That's where we'll focus our efforts."

A SMART MOVE

Alcatel-Lucent is spot on to focus on improving customer satisfaction. Contact centers are a critical touch point for owning the customer relationship and determining customer satisfaction. With Genesys' leadership position in contact centers, Alcatel-Lucent has a competitive advantage in any discussion about customer.

However, Alcatel-Lucent hasn't been as effective in managing the sales interface to leading and mid-tear companies. "The CIO of Nestle doesn't want to deal with different sales teams for each of our products," said de Pesquidoux. Now he won't have to. Alcatel-Lucent has reorganized its sales teams so that major enterprise will gain a single interface into the company.The mid-tier is a bigger question. Alcatel had lacked a strong certification platform for its channel partners. Rodriguez says that the company will unveil next week a new partner program that will reward the resellers for the investment they make in Alcatel-Lucent. Those who invest more with the company will see steeper discounts and deeper exposure to Alcatel technology.At the same time, Alcatel-Lucent will need to fill three key holes in its technology offering if the company is to help others improve their customer satisfaction:

Lack of mid-tier contact center. While Alcatel-Lucent may want to leverage the Genesys contact center, much growth in today's enterprise market is coming from the SMB. Genesys lacks a leader Alcatel-Lucent will need to address.

Restricted presence infrastructure. Enabling enterprises to improve their customer satisfaction ratings rides on being able to tap the right enterprise resource in real time. Contact-center agents need to know the availability of key sales people, technology experts, and other resources within the enterprise to most effectively resolve customer queries quickly. This means being able to aggregate the individual presence into group presence, something Alcatel-Lucent does not offer today.

Coherent service creation platform.Enterprises need to be able to create and deliver new serivces quckly and effectively yet Alcatel-Lucent lacks an enterprise platform for deploying such new services Arch-rival Avaya just purchased such a platform with its recent Ubiquity acquisition. Expect Alcatel-Lucent to deliver a similar platform either through partnership with a third-party or more likely by adapting Lucent's carrier grade platform to the enterprise.