Alcatel Lucent is about to make the Internet 5 times faster with its new core router 7950 XRS. According to CNN that is 16 Terabits of data per second or 2.5 Million HD videos streamed per second! But Alcatel had tried to break into the CISCO-Juniper stronghold of this market that consists of all manner of wired and wireless Internet providers. The earlier attempt by Alcatel, to enter this market ten years ago, failed. This was before Alcatel acquired Lucent and in the meanwhile CISCO has been setting the technical standard so how does Alcatel-Lucent believe that it can break in to the market now? According to Lindsay Newell the Marketing VP of Alcatel-Lucent's IP business for this B2B market you need credibility,opportunity and competitive advantage. Kinds of things that are really needed to succeed in marketing to the upstream supply chain,particularly in high-tech fields. Here is how Alcatel-Lucent hopes to break into the market:
- Credibility Alcatel-Lucent had entered the edge router business in 2003. Think of the edge router as similar to providing the ramp to the information highway. Staying with the highway analogy,the edge router takes individual requests from the main street and puts them onto the highway. This market is now worth 2B$ to Alcatel-Lucent and it is no. 2 with 24% share having edged out Juniper networks from the second spot after CISCO. And gained great credibility in the process.
- Opportunity: This blog had discussed the band-width crunch in wireless in the wireless space where AT&T has been buying bandwdth or building more highways and getting ahead of Verizon. What if you could drive five times faster on the highways you own? When B2C demand is zooming for video,gaming and cloud computing ? Besides this market is estimated at 4B$ and growing at 10%.
- Competitive Advantage: The competitive advantage is in the capacity and quality of the 7950XRS, that took three and a half years to develop. It is claimed to be 5 times faster than the 2010 offering of CISCO the CRS-3. And through the edge router market entry Alcatel-Lucent has a 450 customers base many of whom are already using their edge routers. A bit like having the ramp installed and just putting in the highway!. Potential customers like Verizon are are excited about the possibilities just as B2C customers complain about caps in usage.
As CISCO and Juniper ramp up their offerings, Internet users should feel some relief coming their way while upstream B2B marketers get some cues from the Alcatel-Lucent strategy of introducing high cost innovations in B2B markets.Contact StratoServe.