Alcatel-Lucent’s launch of a broad array of services, comes at a time when more organisations are turning to outsourced or managed IT services as a way of keeping operational costs down of their IT departments and data centre down.
Dave Miller, senior VP, Worldwide fields operations at Alcatel-Lucent said two year ago when Alcatel merged with Lucent, the enterprise services business was in many silos. Miller said the company immediate sought ways of correcting this ensuring that it brought all the services activities in line with its product portfolio.
Miller said this was obvious a challenge for the company as it wanted to develop an end-to-end service offering that would benefit all the business units within Alcatel-Lucent. “We overcame this by merging the various products across the business units with a service level activity,” he said.
Miller said, Alcatel-Lucent has built a services unit that boasts consulting, designing, operational integration, maintenance and deployment skills and expertise. “We have managed to train 20 000 service profession globally who will help clients and channel partner with whatever service activity they require from Alcatel-Lucent on all its product offerings,” he said. “We have struck that balance between our product offerings and the services to support these solutions.”
Miller reiterated that the launch of services which will target verticals such as government, education, healthcare, energy, smart communities and transportation sectors are in no way aimed at getting business away from Alcatel-Lucent’s channel partners. “The services are complementary to what our partners are already offering in the market,” he said.
He pointed out that Alcatel-Lucent would like to grow its services reach in both the addressable and serviceable markets.
He added that as a result of balancing the services with the product offering, Alcatel grew its service revenue from the Carrier and Enterprise business units by 12%. “The total services revenue contribution last year was 3.5billion euros,” he said. “This is a significant contribution to the overall revenue contribution of the company which last year was 17 billion euros.
Looking ahead, Miller explained that Alcatel-Lucent was pushing the services initiative further by providing vertical specialisations and competencies. “We realise that a significant challenge for CIOs especially in these tough times is to offer services to business units within their own organisation set-up,” he noted. “The services have been developed to help CIOs cope with the growing pain of escalating IT costs.
He added that as many coming are turning to managed and outsourced service offerings, the services portfolio that Alcatel-Lucent has launched will certainly grow stronger.
