Alcatel-Lucent officials recently addressed the need for converged ICT in light of their signed agreement with HP.
"On Oct. 20, 2009, HP and Alcatel-Lucent signed the final agreement for a global alliance that addresses this reality" of convergence, ALU officials said. "The alliance will bring to market integrated telecommunications and IT products that address service providers' and enterprises' needs for converged information and communication technologies."
Jouni Forsman, research vice president at Gartner, recently addressed the issue, saying: "Tomorrow's communications needs will lead to more and more interconnection of the telecommunications and IT industries. A truly converged approach would offer more and better services for businesses and consumers but is extremely difficult to deliver."
The answer, Forsman said, was for "major IT and telecom players to get closer to one another to offer integrated products that can improve the business case for network transformation and help speed-up the pace of innovation on end-user services."
As ALU officials pointed out, "the primary focus of transformation tends to be on the bottom line. Converging two networks into one, two devices into one, or two databases into one predictably results in a lower total cost of ownership."
Alcatel-Lucent officials explain convergence as "part of the solution to removing barriers between networks, people, processes and knowledge. This speeds business processes and decision making, both of which save time and money."
A converged product, then, "provides single-point visibility of IT and telecoms operations and thus the ability to manage them more effectively," ALU officials said, "from a purely practical standpoint, dealing with a single supplier for a converged solution rather than two separate providers reduces costs through simplified interaction."
In practical terms, faster flows of information in a converged system mean that a customer issue can be dealt with more quickly, or that a supply chain problem can be solved before it hits service level agreement. And of course improved business agility and better collaboration between employees enable innovation and allow new services to be brought to market more quickly.
"Convergence has led directly to the emergence of new solutions and better ways to serve customers. The rise of interactive voice response in the contact center environment is one such example," ALU officials point out:
"These principles of convergence are broadly applicable regardless of the networks, devices or media being converged. What is true for voice and data, or fixed and mobile, is also true of IT and telecommunications."
