Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Touts Network on Demand Service

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is offering businesses a way to reduce their IT budgets with a “comprehensive” pay-per-use offer for LAN and Wi-Fi services.

The Alcatel-Lucent Network on Demand service (or ALE for short) will also allow businesses to utilise the latest technology on a pay-per-use basis.

Pay-Per-Use

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise points out that the use pay-per-use model allows firms to avoid hefty upfront capital expenditure on new networking infrastructure, and instead means they can better match technology expenses with real world business needs, without worrying about acquiring new skills to operate the new tech.

Indeed, it points that analyst house IDC has forecast that by 2020, 80 percent of IT infrastructure will be on a pay-as-you-go basis. Hewlett-Packard meanwhile has offered pay-per-use networks since 2012.

“Network on Demand is a unified and secure LAN/WiFi managed service delivered via Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Partners,” said the company. It incorporates its Intelligent Fabric, Unified Access and Network Analytics offerings. It also offers automated, “out-of-the box” cloud managed tools for businesses.

It is not hard to see the appeal of the pay-per-use model. Customers will only be charged for the daily use of network devices. So for example a school that has virtually no network activity on a weekend or holiday, would not be charged for the parts of the network not being used. Likewise hotel rooms would only be charged when they are occupied.

“Looking at the increased acceptance of IT on demand via cloud application services, we wanted to be the first to offer our customers the benefits of a new set of network services,” said Stephane Robineau, EVP and General Manager, Networking Business division, ALE.

“Designed with our partners, Network on Demand changes the game by making it possible to offer OPEX consumption-based, unified, on demand LAN and WiFi managed services,” said Robineau.

Chinese Owners

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) has been on a bit of journey in recent years.

It was originally the enterprise networking and communications business of Alcatel-Lucent, but faced a period of uncertainty after its French parent (Alcatel-Lucent) sought to sell the business on a number of occasions in order to cut costs.

In 2011 it put the entire enterprise business on the block, but in the end succeeded only in selling the growing call centre part of the unit, Genesys, to private equity firm Permira for $1.5bn (£945m).

But in February 2014 ALE was finally sold to Chinese investment company China Huaxin.

And in an ironic twist, the parent Alcatel-Lucent itself was purchased by Nokia in an all-share deal worth up to €15.6bn (£11.2bn). It said the deal made sense as it would be better equipped to compete with the likes of Huawei and Ericsson in the networking equipment market.

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