This week was Alcatel-Lucent's (ALU) industry analyst conference in Annapolis, MD. Much of the first day was dominated by presentations and discussions around the communications portfolio, which had a distinct cloud flavor to it. The company had announced some of this at Enterprise Connect last month but did fill in some gaps, and I thought it was worth the review of the offerings given how hot cloud-based UC is today.
ALU will go to market with three cloud packages--OpenTouch Cloud Enterprise, OpenTouch Cloud Office and OpenTouch Cloud Personal. ALU's strategy, like the other equipment vendors, is to be a cloud enabler, not a cloud provider; they'll sell infrastructure to their resellers and channel partners. There are many similarities in the go-to-market for ALU compared to the other UC solution providers, but there are a number of differences.
For example, the industry trend has been to sell pre-configured, pre-integrated hardware and software combined--basically "cloud in box"--as a way of ensuring a quality service once the infrastructure is brought on line. But ALU has no specific hardware requirements and claims the solution can run on as little as three virtual machines. The only requirement ALU has is that they prefer to run on a VMWare virtual machine, although the people I talked to about it said they've tested it on Xen and KVM but not Hyper-V yet.
The software-only approach helps ALU keep the cost down, meaning the commitment level from their partners can be kept low. Additionally, the company is willing to share the risk with the resellers, so any partner that wants to sell OpenTouch Cloud Enterprise can do so with a commitment level of as low as 50 seats. This is considerably lower than seat levels required by some of the other UC vendors.
The service starts as low as $9 per month, which I thought was a crazy low price. ALU did explain, though, that the pricing is built on a consumption basis. This means customers can start with that low entry point and then add on services such as voice mail, conferencing, unified messaging and other UC-related services for an incremental fee.
One of the common themes we heard at the conference from ALU partners was how partner-friendly ALU has been through deployments. Obviously, building a UC cloud platform isn't easy and ALU is willing to do much of the heavy lifting to ensure the deployment is successful. It's also worth noting that ALU partners could choose to make a CapEx purchase if they want to, instead of doing it as an incremental OpEx purchase. If the partner has the experience to deploy and sell the service, the CapEx option may make more sense.
The three flavors of OpenTouch Cloud are for different audiences. OpenTouch Cloud Enterprise is for companies over 200 employees. OpenTouch Cloud Office is designed for SMBs--that is, companies under that 200-employee mark. OpenTouch Cloud Personal Edition is an overlay cloud service that allows individual users to manage their own cloud applications.
In some sense, OpenTouch Personal is really more of an app store that acts as a repository for applications to be directed to individuals, departments or teams of any size company. If executed on correctly, the applications in OpenTouch Personal will be a mix of ALU-developed applications, third-party applications from vendors that build OpenTouch-integrated applications, and in-house developed apps.
The big challenge here for ALU will, of course, be channel training. Most of the channel partners in the UC space like to sell boxes, like to sell communications solutions, and are used to a tried and true deployment model. For all the value of cloud, it is a different sales model and often has different buyers.
This may sound like a barrier but it could also work in ALU's favor. This market is dominated right now by the big three--Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft--particularly here in the US. ALU could approach a line-of-business manager with an OpenTouch-based application that's cloud delivered. Low barrier to entry plus business relevancy creates new opportunities with new buyers.
If ALU can change its sales approach, it can pull through other infrastructure as well. I'm not saying this is easy to do, but it creates an opening for ALU that it hasn't had before.
Overall, I thought the strategy for the ALU cloud was well thought out. The company is willing to share the risk with its channel partners to move this market forward and this will be a competitive differentiator as ALU makes a stronger push in the US market.
Follow Zeus Kerravala on Twitter and Google+!
@zkerravala
Zeus Kerravala on Google+
