Alcatel-Lucent CMO: How we get there from here

On turning app developers loose: There are other things you could do. Security is another, or privacy. They’re all attributes that a service provider has a huge amount of experience and capability around that they could expose to others to use. We can go into our routers and our broadband access equipment and expose capabilities in there; we can put devices in the home that have platforms on them that app developers could build on to. If I put a device in the home that a service provider provided and that has an app on it that’s wide open to the developer community, the local utility could deploy a range of sensors around the consumer home and offer a home energy management service. Or a health care institution could offer post-operative patient monitoring to keep [patients] out of the emergency room.

On partnering: We know we can’t get this done ourselves. We've been in a very closed environment. We’ve partnered as an exception rather than a rule. We’ll partner now as a rule rather than exception.

On when it all becomes real: It’s hard to answer that question. There are revolutionary steps that happen, but in the end, it’s a radical evolution that occurs. I would never have been able to tell you two years ago that I would be an avid Facebook user; I wouldn't have known what the term meant. I think this [over-the-top app enablement] capability rolls out in bits and pieces over the next one to five years. We're already rolling out bits of it today. Five years from now, we’ll be in this world.