Must read article. Lucent: The Next Master of the Universe? (Part III)
telecoms-mag.com
Buying Into a Data Strategy
Lucent's acquisition of Livingston Enterprises fills a hole with remote
access concentrators and servers and also offers a few routing products
and a network management system. "With that acquisition, they can start
to sell a virtual private network (VPN) story to their service provider
customers and allow them to sell VPN services to their corporate
network accounts," said IDC analyst Esmeralda Silva.
Although Livingston has a customer base of more than 2000 small and
regional ISPs, the company's lower capacity PortMaster products do
not give Lucent access to national ISP accounts. "From just a capacity
standpoint, the Livingston box is still not close to the Ascend MAX TNT
or the Total Control system from 3Com," Silva said. "They need to come
out with a higher capacity system to go after larger accounts, particularly
as the consolidation of the smaller ISPs continues."
From the Prominet acquisition, Lucent gets the line of Cajun Gigabit
Ethernet switching products that began shipping last September. Silva
said that acquisition helps round out Lucent's LAN offerings for campus
backbones and sends a clear signal that Lucent is trying to become more
than a bystander in the enterprise data space. "The Cajun box is a Layer
3 box, which is a hot growth area. It's not a box that will be used by the
service providers," she said. "They have WAN equipment and a strong
LAN story through the Prominet box. Now they need to provide frame
relay support within that box to basically bridge the gap between the
wide area and local area. I would expect them to make some
enhancements in that respect this year."
Start-Ups: A Bold Approach to Capitalizing on Bell Labs Technology. .
.Finally
The words "start-up company" usually conjure up thoughts of a small
group of people working day and night in a garage in Silicon Valley to get
a breakthrough product off the ground. The days are long and the teams
spinning out new businesses at Bell Labs are small, but there is one
difference: The ventures have the backing of a $26 billion networking
giant.
Lucent, which itself was spun off from AT&T in 1996, has created six
small companies based on technology breakthroughs from Bell Labs.
"We're trying to have our cake and eat it, too, with what we think is very
exciting technology that is resonant in Bell Labs," said Tom Uhlman,
president of the new ventures group that was created in the
reorganization last October. "Bell Labs is a volcano of technology and
not all of the technology that is spewing out is being used by the business
units."
So far, about 30 business cases have been presented to the new ventures
group. Bell Labs has inspired six ventures and these have been well
received in the industry; several others are still in the analysis stage. The
11 business units get first crack at a new technology or product, but if it
doesn't fit into one of those groups, it usually appears on Uhlman's desk;
it's his job is to look past a great technology for a great business
opportunity.
Among the winning ideas turned
into venture companies are elemedia, which markets software that
enables high-quality voice, video, and music over the Internet; Inferno, a
network operating system that allows any communications device to
share information with any other over any network; and Visual Insights, a
software research tool that uncovers and displays patterns and trends
that are often buried in large amounts of data. The latest concept to get a
go-ahead is Lucent Digital Video, which markets products that enable
video broadcasting over a variety of networks, including satellite,
wireless, ATM, and cable.
Technology ideas in the screening process include computer security,
analog-to-digital radio, and software protocol for efficient multicasting
over the Internet. Uhlman said there is no limit to the number of
companies that are spun off in a given time frame, but said he expects to
have "significantly more than the six current spin-offs" in the new ventures
group next year.
The goal for the group is to provide front-end business support for
research at Bell Labs. "There have been frustrated scientists and
researchers at Bell Labs for many years who have developed technology
that has not been used by the parent company," Uhlman said. "We have
the ability to analyze some of these markets for business opportunities
rather than waiting until some researcher has spent years developing
something only to discover there is no market for it."
As with any venture, success is not expected overnight. Uhlman is even
prepared for the possibility that some of the ventures might fail. "This is
an investment in the future," Uhlman said. "This is not next quarter's or
even next year's foundation for Lucent's success. We are taking a longer
term view of this as an engine for new business opportunities."
[TOP] |
