Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle TechScape – Rumours of Alcatel Lucent’s demise are way off the mark. In fact, the company is thriving and looking forward to an even better future.
Craig Taylor, sales manager: strategic vertical at Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, explains that Nokia took over the carrier portion of the company in 2015, but the enterprise portion has remained operational.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provides secure total turnkey networking and communication solutions that enable organisation and industries to accelerate their operational efficiencies and competitiveness.
The company has been around for decades, and survived many upheavals, because it has kept up with changing times, says Taylor.
Taylor believes a key component of Alcatel-Lucent’s success is the fact that it has not acquired and rebranded other vendors’ products. Instead it has grown its own reliable and secure network portfolio – including WLAN, LAN and network services – from the ground up.
Taylor explains that the solutions all feature reliability and availability, robust security, and management from a single systems.
“These are our main advantages when it comes to technology,” Taylor says.
Alcatel Lucent’s complete communications portfolio spans cloud, on-premise and hybrid solutions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is bring rolled out across the portfolio. For instance, it is being used extensively in the switching technology for self-healing.
Arguably the biggest benefit of AI lies in management solutions, where Alcatel Lucent offers complete visibility of the whole system – including both wired and wireless networks – with no blind spots.
Intelligent control is another vital feature. AI handles monitoring with built-in security, which allows for faster-resolution AI that works for the user, Taylor says. In addition, there is a full audit trail for decision-making.
“Importantly, there is no lock-in: the management is available in the cloud, on-premise or both – and users can change if the situation changes.”
Management tools include a new network advisor that monitors the network 24/7, looking for changed. It first learns how the network operates, the spots anomalies and takes action where appropriate.
AI has also been used to improve security. “Security is built in, not bolted on,” Taylor points out.
Alcatel networks offer embedded NAC and Zero Trust network access, so administrators can see who is on the network.
Continuing its AI journey, Alcatel-Lucent has moving into a new vertical – AI data centres.
The company delivers a pre-validated AI and high-performance computing (HPC) platform combining GPU computing, ethernet fabric, software and orchestration – all built for predictable scale.
“We are agnostic in terms of chip technology, using different solutions depending on what is best suited to different applications,” Taylor explains.
The compute offered by Alcatel Lucent offers AI performance, high speed architecture, and an open software ecosystem – all in an efficient design.
“We have committed to shipping these servers within 12 weeks of order,” Taylor adds. “And are competitive when it comes to price.
“We want to attack this market quite aggressively, and believe we can with the scalable, flexible, open and trusted and end to end solution.”