The 2017 Digital Edge 50 Award honors Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Connected Products

ALE, operating under the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise brand,  announced it was named a 2017 Digital Edge 50 Award recipient for its innovative connected products data program. The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise initiative, internally titled Connected Products and Data Lake, was recognized for connecting IT with data, processes and people for improved internal efficiency, strengthened customer and channel partner relationships and new business models.

By connecting digital infrastructure and the data extracted from it, ALE is leveraging new insights to deliver more informed business solutions and models that support ALE partner and customer’s digital business needs.

The annual Digital Edge awards, co-sponsored by CIO and Computerworld, recognize digital initiatives driving customer engagement, higher sales conversions and new products, as well as revenue and profit growth.

How it works

Within the past year, ALE has made it a priority to enable and deliver connected products. ALE has enhanced its portfolio of networking and communications infrastructure products and internal IS/IT systems to automatically deliver relevant product and usage information to a cloud-based data lake. The stored data has then been mined to provide fast, accurate information to partners and customers, improving visibility, automating asset management and delivering proactive services. ALE has been working with its partners and end customers to develop new innovative offerings leveraging the mined data:

• ALE has piloted three analytics based solutions with customers creating real-time proactive maintenance detection and asset and system resources inventory reports to help track service.
• ALE created a networking infrastructure pay-per-use model with the Network on Demand solution, a first of its kind on the market to share the risk of investment with the customer.
• New insights enable Channel Partners to provide remote maintenance via connected ALE products and the data they deliver, resulting in savings of time and operational maintenance from Partners’ support staff.
•  ProActive Lifecycle Management helps minimize risk to the network due to outdated operating system, end of support hardware, and service contracts. As a cloud-based service application, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Partners and customers are able to see Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise switches and controllers on a customer’s network through a single, secure web portal
• A management bird’s eye view also support Channel Partners’ OmniPCX® Office installed based to quickly recognize maintenance needs, inventory and upsell opportunities.

Jacques Goudet, CIO, ALE said, “This innovative project brings a complete 360° view of infrastructure assets, capacity and performance to customers and partners managing LAN, WLAN or VoIP solutions. We achieved these insights from the data pool by aggregating information gathered from connected products and the intelligence embedded within our Information Systems.  The true value comes from the insights delivered from the data, analytics and dashboards, optimizing the costs, usage and obsolescence of LAN and VoIP infrastructure.”

Anne McCrory, Digital Edge program chair and group vice president of customer experience and operations for IDG Enterprise Events said, “The complexity and scale of the initiatives in the Digital Edge 50 show how quickly organizations are progressing to the next phase of digital transformation. They are taking advantage of new capabilities, such as AI and deep machine learning, to enhance their mobile and analytics practices worldwide. They are finding dramatic results from the cloud, and serving customers in faster and more elegant ways. Their adoption of agile, extreme programming and completely reworked business processes show how even the most traditional businesses can go big with digital with the right vision and leadership.”

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will participate in the Digital Edge 50 award ceremony at the AGENDA17 Conference, which takes place from March 20–22, 2017 in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.