Paris, France…

 

Dateline Paris… sounds romantic and worldly, and yet I find myself here in the French capital on assignment, covering the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum 2007.

 

This event is much larger than I had expected, with over 125 colleagues of mine from the world media here to learn what Alcatel-Lucent is up to on the enterprise front, as well as an expected 7,000 attendees, business partners, users, and potential customers.

 

This evening we met in the press room, which is decked out quite nicely I might say, with excellent WiFi access, helpful staff, and now that our solutions demo walk through is over, with Taittinger and hors’doeuvres mixed in among the printers and workstations.

 

One can hear several languages at once – right now I hear French, English, Greek, Russian, Italian, and several dialects I can’t quite place.

 

Back to the walk through…

 

Our guide for this evening — they broke us up in to small groups based presumably on language — was David Buckley, Product Line Director for Alcatel-Lucent’s Large and Medium Enterprise Group.

 

I don’t have time now to go into all the details of everything we saw, but we got an excellent overview of all the solutions that Alcatel-Lucent will have on offer to the market in 2007, including solutions targeted at the following constituencies: large enterprise, SMB, and Contact Center.

 

While this is the enterprise side of the house, one can still see some of Lucent’s influence in the products on offer. Lucent’s Vital suite and Brick suite are featured among several of the solutions.

 

The general theme for 2007 is TRANSFORMATION. Network transformation. Services transformation. Business transformation.

 

And in the very first demo we saw, David pointed out that the company is moving away from a strict “feature-selling” plan of attack, to incorporate more of a “user-profile” driven sale. Customization and Personalization are the name of the game.

 

Depending on the user profile or identity of the worker, the enterprise solution is targeted at the specific user’s needs. There are a series of general identities, which users fall into, such as Executive or Office worker. Mobile professional or On-site roamer. Perhaps Team worker? All these profiles carry with them the specific technology and solution needs that would most benefit the user in their daily work routine.

 

There was a lot of focus on the areas of Collaboration, Mobility, Unified communications, and empowering companies to embrace contact center technology to produce a customer friendly business.

 

I can’t wait to get back down to the exhibit hall to get a closer look at some of these solutions tomorrow.

 

Time difference being what it is, it’s time for bed. A bientot!