Constant change

Alcatel-Lucent’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa president, Adolfo Hernandez, believes the company’s decision to concentrate on the activities and technologies in which it has intrinsic advantages shall serve it even better as time goes on. High leverage networks, fibre, femtocells and LTE are amongst those areas in which the technology company expects to excel

Hernandez, Alcatel-Lucent’s EMEA president says with 40 per cent of the company’s revenues being generated in the region, it remains a strategically significant one

In the middle of December UAE telco Du announced it would be deploying Alcatel-Lucent supplied femtocells for its fixed and mobile converged services, scheduled for launch by the end of the year. Leveraging its existing fixed and mobile infrastructure assets, Du is looking to deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s small cells technology to help its customers overcome indoor mobile coverage issues.

In October, rival telco Etisalat announced the deployment of the first femtocell live project in the UAE. It was also provided by Alcatel-Lucent.

“We’re in the middle of a femtocell explosion, and I believe the deployments we have begun to see in recent quarters shall only intensify in number and scope,” says Adolfo Hernandez, president for Alcatel-Lucent in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa. “Vodafone was a first mover with respect to wide scale deployment of femtos, and since then, the business case for them has really been recognised.”

Alcatel-Lucent already has a well-established position in the burgeoning femtocell space, with a product line that includes an end-to-end femto-based 9360 Small Cell portfolio consisting of the 9361 Home Cell, the 9362 Enterprise Cell, the 9366 Small Cell Gateway, and Small Cell Management & Customer Care systems.

The deployment of fibre in significant amounts in both the Middle East and Africa, and the growth in international connectivity networks in Africa in particular is a trend that Hernandez believes shall revolutionise the telco landscape as new service models and solutions are brought into play.

“The MEA region is such a diverse one and our experience as quite a broad-based technology provider is that different customers are buying things in different cycles,” Hernandez explains. “In the Middle East and in Western Europe, service providers are investing in a bit of everything, for example, whether that be LTE, fibre or femtocells. They are building the next generation of infrastructure.”

A number of Alcatel-Lucent’s telco customers operate across segments and have begun playing outside of their traditional borders. As such Alcatel-Lucent has taken the view of interacting with these customers as multi-nationals, offering managed services for both traditional as well as non-traditional activities.

With respect to its regional presence, Hernandez says Alcatel-Lucent continues to benefit from the footprint and relationships established under the old Alcatel, and that the technology provider continues to increase and improve its hubbing skills all the time.

“We are constantly evolving.” Hernandez says. “And what our focus has become is to evaluate which points we are going to be good at, and then properly resourcing these points.”

One such point is the evolution of IP networks, and Alcatel-Lucent’s innate belief that over time divergent communications shall collapse into a single network. That single network shall have more leverage points, for example, routing and transportation combined and it is in the evolution of this more intelligent network – the High Leverage Network (HLN) – that Alcatel-Lucent is a driving force of innovation.

100G is central to the Alcatel-Lucent HLN architecture, which addresses the dual challenges of simultaneously scaling and managing network capacity while delivering differentiated, revenue-generating services. It achieves this by delivering scalable bandwidth at the lowest cost per bit and by embedding intelligence in the network to enable dynamic service creation and delivery. The HLN architecture is at the foundation of the Alcatel-Lucent Application Enablement vision. It collapses multiple complex, costly overlay networks into a simpler, fully optimised network that leverages technical innovations and embraces existing environments. Comprehensive transformation services provide additional business, network and service delivery support to de-risk, accelerate and monetise network evolution.

Alcatel-Lucent’s activities in the optical arena are also progressing well according to Hernandez, who says enterprise communications have become an industry must, and the company has been working hard at establishing partnerships across specific industry segments. Twelve months ago Alcatel-Lucent took a strategic decision to focus on a number of vertical industries it believed it could have the greatest impact on and has been deepening its participation in these segments since.

LTE is another area in which Alcatel-Lucent believes it possesses significant competitive advantages that it can take advantage of, and as such is looking to partner with key service providers around the world as they move to commercialise the technology. At the beginning of December for example, Vodafone Qatar and Alcatel-Lucent announced the performance of the first live demonstration of LTE.

The live LTE demo – the first in Qatar –used 800 MHz spectrum and demonstrated a speed increase of up to six times that enjoyed by customers on 3G today, narrowing the gap between fixed and mobile experiences.

“LTE is more than the radio interface, it is an end-to-end network solution,” says Hernandez. “Customers are now purchasing solutions and not technologies, and this is a world that we as Alcatel-Lucent can add much value,” he adds.

Hernandez envisages a move to an “all-you-can-eat” type delivery and consumption model for applications, and believes pricing tools such as capping, tier-pricing and pricing per service will play a more significant role in the future.

He believes that telcos will also start to buy solutions ‘by category’ meaning that an end-to-end service provider such as Alcatel-Lucent would be at an advantage in terms of catering to such requirements.