Alcatel-Lucent's Dynamic Enterprise TourAlcatel-Lucent's Dynamic Enterprise Tour

What ALU describes is an open, SIP-based platform that will have support for UC, collaboration, and customer service.

I've spent the past few days in Paris, attending the "anchor event" of a 20-city Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise road show. With a reported 868 visitors, there were only minor hiccups due to the ongoing strikes in France. Longer-than-usual bus trips to the venue and the occasional delayed session waiting for speakers stuck in traffic did not detract from either the beauty of Paris or the strength of ALU's position in its native land.

In North America, ALU has struggled to gain traction with its enterprise telephony business against the juggernauts of Avaya, Nortel and Cisco. (They do, however, maintain a healthy market share in the contact center space with the Genesys brand.) It's likely the reason that there are fewer roadshow stops in North America than in EMEA, 6 versus 11 (the others presumably in Asia and South America).

In EMEA, the story is far different. Tom Eggemeier, SVP for ALU Enterprise sales in EMEA, talks proudly of heading a profitable, billion-dollar enterprise business for ALU in EMEA. He goes on to describe market share growth over the past few years, from approximately 14 to 18 percent. While Cisco continues to gain share in EMEA--and is a competitor that Eggemeier has a healthy respect for--Cisco's growth has been more gradual in EMEA than in the US, likely due to a slower adoption of IP telephony.

That slowness may work to Alcatel-Lucent's favor as the company begins the marketing rollout of its new converged architecture. Notice the careful wording of that last sentence. Alcatel-Lucent did not formally announce a new product. The converged architecture does not yet have a name. You don't see the typical hyperlink to a press release because there wasn’t one.

All that said, there was a fair amount of detail presented to customers and analysts about the direction ALU is taking. What ALU describes is an open, SIP-based platform that will have support for UC, collaboration, and customer service. It starts with the SIP and media server assets of Genesys, adds the applications of ALU Enterprise and Genesys and is administered and managed by a new management layer. The prominence of Genesys components in the converged architecture should counter some of the FUD raised when ALU Enterprise and Genesys merged organizationally in January 2010, that Genesys would be completely absorbed.

Last month I wrote here that Alcatel-Lucent's virtual analyst event was too service provider focused for my taste, saying that for an enterprise analyst it was like getting the appetizer and no entree. Two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions and one-on-one sessions made for a very complete (French) meal.