The Hindu Business Line : Alcatel Lucent lines up slew of initiatives for SMB segment

Paris, Feb. 21 French technology major Alcatel Lucent has lined up a slew of initiatives as part of an aggressive strategy to take a larger share of the enterprise communications services market in India.

The moves, aimed at taking on market leaders Cisco and Avaya, include a new product for the Indian small and medium business segment to be launched in April this year.

Alcatel Lucent has also entered into an agreement with telecom services company Tata Teleservices to launch data conferencing in nine cities. This will allow customers to conduct multi-city conferencing facility wherein they can send and receive video, presentations and also talk to each other from different locations at the same time.

This initiative is in direct competition to Cisco’s Telepresence product.

Explaining the strategy for the enterprise segment, Mr Anil Srivastava, Executive Vice- President, EMEA, Alcatel Lucent, told Business Line, “India is an exciting market for us. But since we have been late in the enterprise segment we have to do things differently from what competition is already doing. We are going to launch a product for the SMB segment that will be disruptive to what is being offered by our competitors.”

Mr Srivastava said that Alcatel Lucent’s product portfolio was geared to take the benefit of open Internet-based standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which makes deployment faster and also enable a whole new range of services.

In talks with 3 operators

The company is in talks with 3 operators in the country to launch the new SMB product for which a chain of 75 resellers are being trained.

“The product will offer a managed end- to-end solution for the SMBs which will make it a cost-effective proposition for them compared to buying voice, data and IT from different vendors.

“In order to expand our reach we will increase the number of resellers to 100 by 2009. We are not looking at 30-40 per cent growth but in multiples of that to cut through the market,” said Mr Srivastava.

For the large enterprise segment Alcatel plans to break into 10-15 large customers in the country by offering end-to-end solution.

“Today customers are looking for an alternative. Since we have entered this segment late, our first objective is to create a differentiation and then build up from there,” said Mr Srivastava.

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