By Susan J. Campbell
As a network operator, it is imperative that you have the necessary tools and manpower to manage a number of vendors, maintenance contracts and required skill sets. Your complexity and costs are consistently increased by the continuous need to maintain and upgrade legacy equipment. With these challenges in place, it is necessary to implement solutions that will reduce your costs, sharpen your focus on services and customers, as well as maintain the quality of your legacy operations. To accomplish this, many network operators are turning to the Alcatel-Lucent Cost Transformation Program.
This program is designed to offer unique multivendor maintenance services, managed services and capacity, as well as tailored IP transformation strategies. Such services and strategies can help you to optimize profits and QoE while also achieving non-linear OPEX reductions as high as 30 percent.
It is essential to keep in mind the importance of the service delivered to the end customer. Obviously, the more rich, personalized and interactive, the happier the customer will be in the long run. How do you achieve this kind of service delivery when you rely on so many points to work together? The optimal answer is to create that single point of accountability.
At the end of the day, customers don't care what the network is doing; instead they care about the services they receive and the content for which they are charged. They also want to access that content on their preferred device at any time and within any location. The advances in connectivity are making such things possible and the network operator must be able to flawless meet this demand.
In this new environment, it is clear that the concept of managed services has changed. Such services can no longer be limited to operationally focused and network-centric. The next generation of managed services shifts the emphasis to focus on end-customer services. Such services must focus on achieving business transformation with a services-centric approach.
Alcatel-Lucent's approach ensures that a services-centric approach is possible, with total accountability. A partner does enhance the value of the relationship beyond traditional network boundaries by including customer premises devices that can control end-user services. As a result, the network includes devices such as IP set-top boxes and IP modems, which must be monitored for performance quality and customer-relevant metrics.
The Alcatel-Lucent Cost Transformation Program truly helps to deliver measureable results in the new world of rapid content delivery. Network operators cannot afford to move forward without their partners, but accountability it key.
