CMO details Alcatel-Lucent's strategy, future vision

And they can make [content delivery] almost instantaneous because the network operator owns not just storage and big data centers – we're putting storage in our products out in the network and in the consumer home, so the service provider can quietly load into the consumer’s home the top 20 videos, and when they ask for one on demand, it’s instantly there. You put those pieces together, it puts service providers back in the value chain, but it also delivers value.

On managing quality of service for over-the-top apps: We have work to do with service providers [on this]; it’s not going to be ready by January ‘09. But to the extent there’s pragmatism in what’s manageable by the service provider in terms of what access it allows to its network, in this case, you'd say, “I will allow three kinds of QoS.” (They could allow almost any variant, but let’s say three: good, better or best QoS.) “When your app comes through my network, we’ll know about it, and we’ll flip the switches in our routers to give you the good, better or best, whichever one you asked for.” In the end, it would be fully automated, and the app developer -- in software language, it’s almost like, call it a subroutine. A quality subroutine.

On the consumer experience: From a consumer point of view, they could care less how it’s being delivered; they don’t need to be exposed to the technical issues. You’re going to be consuming these capabilities without thinking about it or knowing it. When you walk through a door, when you start your car, and the sensors kick on, and a set of Web services starts up to monitor the car as you go down the road. GM and other car companies are talking about those things today. All of that requires the enablement platforms to be put in place.

On the future of networks: We’re going to an IT world, [with] standard computing platforms that are highly configurable. The network will become flat IP, so that one general-purpose network will deliver every kind of service because it’s highly programmable with respect to the characteristics required to deliver that service. It’s a little bit like your laptop. That’s just a big standard computing platform on top of which people put lots of apps that engage APIs into the operating system. This is where the network is headed, into this domain. The PC does have value, and without it, you're dead.

On moving the applications group from being a smaller unit within the carrier networking group to its own group beside carrier networking: That was one of the big moves. Ben didn’t spend a huge amount of time talking about that because in order to deliver on the strategy –and we’re at the beginning of that strategy – there are lots of products to be built. He took the apps business, a business of service delivery platforms like IMS, middleware platforms, payment platforms, VoIP, various things like that that are service-provider-oriented, and put that together with Genesis, a call-center technology platform that’s been a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent for years and has a huge capability in enablement platforms. He wanted to put those two competencies together. Now you have a 2000-engineer-strong software business to go execute on these enablement platforms.