Alcatel Lucent Transformation Underway to Support “Hybrid Clouds”

Market realities and technological changes have spawned dramatic changes in Alcatel-Lucent and its Genesys subsidiary. Genesys has long been offering leading-edge software that supports customer interactions that transcend the lines of demarcation between contact center resources, enterprise infrastructure and the public network. From a topological point of view, they’ve made the transition from contact center into the enterprise data center and, to some degree into carrier-based server farms.

Rejiggering its sales channel and partnership model to reflect product changes has been a tougher nut to crack. Central to today’s announcement is the combination (or, in some cases, re-combination) of the Genesys and Alcatel Lucent Enterprise Software Division sales forces into a single entity offering a single set of solutions which are, in turn, constructed atop a “hybrid cloud” – acknowledging that real-time, B2B and B2C interactions are indifferent to whether resources are physically in an enterprise or carrier’s data center.

Bottom line: this is an important, evolutionary step for Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys as it sorts out its own presence in an “open”, cloud-based, multi-vendor world. Cisco and Avaya stand out as the direct competition ALU/Genesys. Avaya, especially in recent months, has been promoting a message of simplicity in a world where large-scale solutions are necessarily complex. The reorganization at ALU has the feel of a market-driven necessity as customers look to their vendors to provide simple solutions to their own transformational challenges.