Alcatel-Lucent CMO: How we get there from here

Last week, Alcatel-Lucent’s new chief executive officer spelled out a new strategy for the equipment vendor, part of which was a focus on improving the role that telecom service providers play in a world of over-the-top Internet applications and services. But while the CEO didn’t delve too deeply into the specifics of that aspect of the company’s strategy in last week’s presentation, the company’s chief marketing officer, Tim Krause, provided more detail in an interview with Telephony this week. In Part 1 of this 2-part interview, Krause laid out Alcatel-Lucent’s vision for the future of service provider networks. In Part 2, below, he addresses some of the challenges that must be overcome in order to make that vision reality.

On enabling QoS, billing and other controls for over-the-top applications: We are already doing some things that get us started on that path. Some of what we’re doing is in carrier products. We’re virtualizing the network. We go into our service routers, and we put caching memory in them and service assurance cards in them that can be application- and service-aware. We can manipulate the quality of service of a stream based on what app or service it is. It’s at the moment for the exclusive use of the service provider. But if service providers see the value proposition, we can expose that capability to a Web environment by putting standard programmable [application program interfaces (APIs)] on top of our equipment that you could allow others to use. You would get paid for it, but you could allow many app developers to use it. We can make that happen. That’s something we’d have to do in the future to our routers -- make them look much more like IT software platforms. You could almost refer to it as, instead of cloud computing, cloud networking.

On fitting content to any user device: The devil is in the details on that. [Cisco’s plans to provide any-device transcoding] sounds like a great story. To implement it in a service provider network is non-trivial. There are some really important things that have to be solved right away: If it’s an any-screen environment, where is the content? Is it streaming from the content owner or kept somewhere in the network? Whose control is it under? There’s lots of legal precedents about what a consumer can do with content that they’ve purchased, “fair-use” legislation around whether I can buy a movie and make a copy for myself on my VCR. All those fair-use laws kind of fall away if the consumer isn’t the one that owns and keeps the content. So the first thing you have to figure out is what to do about that. We have a technology called Digital Locker. You put storage throughout the network; it’s linked to the storage in the consumer home. So on behalf of the consumer, the service provider can move content to where it needs to be. So when you want to see a video on your mobile handset, it can be streamed to you. It’s a huge problem for consumers: You have your photos, your home movies, all this digital content -- notwithstanding the stuff you actually bought -- that you want to protect and own. We can manage that with some storage capabilities and content management and distribution software. Next, if it’s purchased content, you have to manage the digital rights. Does that person have the rights to consume the content on both their TV and their mobile handset and on the TV screen in their car? If they do, the obvious place to put that technology is in the network that manages that question. So a content owner only has to think about it one time.