Mr. Prasath L Rao  
Country Director – India & South Asia, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

Resilience and Agility through IT Simplicity

In the wake of the pandemic, Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE) has pivoted its marketing mix to focus less on traditional physical face-to-face events in the current landscape. Its strategy spans across raising brand awareness in key go-to-markets and creating demand through vertical and account-based marketing to drive pipeline with its partner ecosystem.

To support and leverage its existing customers, ALE runs a green clinic program for its key verticals - Government, Healthcare, Transportation, Education & Commercial. This program initiates fresh outreach to its install base, where it evaluates pain-points and suggests new converged solution offerings from ALE. It has also instituted Vertical Marketing Programs aimed at the key industries to educate customers and prospects about new ALE offerings.

Furthermore, ALE has initiated multiple partner programs this year. Jointly driven with the key VAD’s & DR’s, these programs take a collective approach to reach the end customer and prospect base. With these programs, key partner accounts have been identified and engaged with integrated marketing tactics. For example, ALE introduced the Build2Win Channel rewards program for its APAC network of partners. This Build2Win program strengthens engagement and supports its partners, while offering an opportunity to recognize and reward the champions within the ALE partner ecosystem.

Accelerating Digital Transformation

ALE is uniquely placed to handle the challenges of remote work. This is the reason why the pandemic did not affect the way it operates. In fact, it has helped to accelerate areas of transformation such as upskilling the team.

ALE has been using its own communication and collaboration platform Rainbow to manage its internal communications even before the pandemic. As such, it was able to seamlessly transition to work from different physical locations.

The Rainbow platform has been key for ALE in engaging with colleagues globally. It allows teams to have centralized discussions that facilitate communication despite the distance, keeping essential communications open across teams in challenging times.

ALE is also taking this time to ensure that the company is well placed and coming back stronger to help businesses to restore and thrive with its solutions.

Creating Customer Experience

ALE has always focused on helping its customers make everything connect by delivering digital age networking, communications and cloud solutions that are tailored for their success. This continues to be its objective this year.

ALE continues to help customers identify pain points and overcome communication and networking challenges. This year, it has helped many customers bridge digital gaps with technology, and successfully supported them in their transition to distributed operations.

By providing their employees with online collaboration tools and business telephony applications, ALE has been able to foster inter-employee communication and collaboration despite physical distances.

Complementing Digital India

When the pandemic hit, millions of Indian citizens were forced to work remotely, creating an unprecedented surge in network traffic. India’s cross-country network coverage was unprepared for the new normal. The Digital India initiative is meant to strengthen India’s mobile and terrestrial network infrastructure and support the country’s small businesses that were hit hard by the said network challenges.

As part of the Digital Village program to connect every rural village, ALE has helped in this effort by connecting about 7,000 villages thus far. It has also customised its smart city solutions for some cities, with ruggedized network switches and access points carrying critical and sensitive data to the monitoring centre.

Additionally, ALE played a significant role in supporting many of India’s metro operators, enabling them to integrate IoT applications and connect standalone systems into their network. ALE’s solutions are also now available on the GeM, the India Government e-Marketplace for public procurement in the government.