Lucent Sees E-Commerce Potential In India
By Uday Lal Pai
India Correspondent (Internet Asia)
[September 24, 1999--MUMBAI] The US telecom major Lucent Technologies is entering Indian Internet market with its Inter-Networking Services (INS) division. It will focus on India as a strategic e-commerce market to provide solutions and systems to infrastructure builders.
Lucent has already bagged contracts from some ISPs for its faster and cost effective digital subscriber line (DSL). "We are negotiating with Videsh SAnchar Nigam Limited and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited and other major private players," said Hirendra Gupta, country manager, INS.
Meanwhile Mike Butcher, president and CEO (Asia-Pacific) of Lucent Technologies, who was in India recently, informed that India has been identified as a strategic market since the country needs a one-stop provider of entire telecom and e-commerce solutions.
"We are looking at the increasing opportunities and the huge infrastructure planned here as we have presence in communications systems and solutions, optic fibre cables and business enterprise solutions" Butcher said.
However, the newly formed division - INS - hopes to tap 60 per cent of the market share in near future, claims company sources. Gupta refused to divulge the details of the contracts it bagged.
INS was formed in July after telecom major merged its Internet operations with the operations of Ascend technologies, another US telecom major, after it was bought for $ 24 billion. Though the merger was announced in January and completed in July.
According to Gupta, ISPs in all three segments have evinced interest in the DSL technology, which will provide 64 K, and 120 K connections at one tenth of the existing charges. "Some of them are already providing the service using our technology which will further revolutionalise the connectivity and service operations in this segment," Gupta added.
Besides, the DSL technology, the INS division will market their Remote Access Servers (RAS) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches to ISPs and other telecom companies in India through the vast Lucent network.
Lucent technologies has recently entered into a marketing alliance with Electronic Resources India Limited (ERIL) - a subsidiary of the Singapore-based Electronic Resources Ltd - for distributing the company's Systimax structured connectivity solutions and WaveLan wireless connectivity solutions in India.
Incidentally, Lucent has established a Bell Labs R&D centre in Pune to develop software for its business communications systems and Octel messaging division. This undertake key changes in technologies to suit particular countries. In India, the company has strength of 1400 employees. |
