On September 9, 2009, Alcatel-Lucent and Telstra announced that they have signed a new partnership agreement establishing Telstra as an Alcatel-Lucent premium Enterprise business partner. Telstra's Enterprise and Government group will now offer Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise portfolio, including the OmniPCX Enterprise telephony platform as well as ALU's OmniTouch unified communications and contact center solutions.Telstra is the traditional carrier incumbent in Australia (similar to our AT&T). Unlike the US, where AT&T was a private company (if highly regulated), Telstra was until 1997 wholly owned by the Australian government. Over the course of 10 years, in three tranches, the government sold its holdings. Telstra has only been a completely private company since October 2006.
I asked Sean O'Halloran, VP of Alcatel-Lucent's Enterprise Business for Australia and New Zealand, why this is happening now. He explained that the agreement is best thought of as an expansion of ALU's existing relationships with Telstra. Alcatel-Lucent was chosen as key partner when Telstra began modernizing its network with IP in 2005, culminating in the 2007 launch of Telstra's Next IP network. On the enterprise side, Telstra has sold ALU's OmniPCX Office solution for the SMB market for several years. Those successful pairings built relationship equity for ALU that presumably decreases Telstra's perceived risk of adding a new vendor to their portfolio.
In the press release, Telstra's Enterprise & Government Executive Director, Martijn Blanken, said, "We look forward to working with Alcatel-Lucent to provide our enterprise customers with additional telecommunications investment options to help them maximize productivity and realize the full value of IP based systems. The new partnership builds upon the companies' existing IP network strategic partnership." The "additional options" alludes to the fact that prior to this agreement, Telstra's principal telephony partners have been Aastra (earlier Ericsson), Mitel and Cisco.
Alcatel-Lucent's key theme in 2009 has been that in order to be successful, they have to help their carrier customers build "high leverage networks," defined as a converged, all-IP multi-service, multi-access network that is application-optimized and application-aware. Telstra began taking steps to build that kind of network four years ago.
At the end of the day, a new channel partner is only what you make of it. Alcatel-Lucent's challenge, as I see it, is to help Telstra highlight ways that the ALU enterprise portfolio working on Telstra's Next IP Network delivers synergies for enterprise and government customers not realized with competitor solutions.
