Networking the Internet

Lucent, Nortel unveil IP personalization strategies Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks want to shake up the Internet - and their stodgy images.

Last Monday Lucent introduced a service intelligent IP network strategy that advances the technologies acquired last September when it bought Spring Tide Networks. Lucent's platform aims to help service providers provision corporate virtual private networks.

The next day Nortel unveiled its personal Internet initiative that combines and leverages assets from the purchase of Shasta Networks and Alteon and helps service providers personalize the Internet.

Both strategies target established service providers and serve as ways to dust off the companies' images as old-line telephone suppliers.

"When you think of IP, Lucent's not the first name that you think of," said Curtis Price, an analyst with Stratecast Partners.

A solid IP strategy, using longtime customer relationships, could reverse that, he added.

"I would put Nortel in this camp, too," he said. "If you look at the pressure by Wall Street to make good on the promise to deliver enhanced IP solutions, it's falling in the lap of the traditional service providers. If you look at who has those [customer] relationships... it's folks like Nortel and Lucent."

Lucent's SpringTide product suite lets "service providers offer IP services tailored to the individual needs of the companies' end users in the same way that enterprise IT units have assembled services," said Tony Gale, Lucent's vice president of IP portfolio management.

Service providers can build a corporate network that "intelligently brings the assembled virtual network to the user wherever the user comes onto the network. The enterprise gets the experience of a privately constructed network but with much simpler and less costly infrastructure," Gale said.

Nortel's effort personalizes the Internet by placing user intelligence at both ends of the network.

"With the Shasta product, we can recognize the type of device that you log onto the network with - computer, cell phone, PDA - pass that information over to the Alteon product, and it will serve the content from the appropriate type of Web server," said Joe Hickey, general manager of the IP services group in Nortel's content networking business unit.

Service providers can embed user information that content providers can access and personalize, which may be troubling at first to some users.

"This personalization comes at the penalty of people knowing about you. You cannot be an anonymous face in the distance and get things that are meaningful to you," warned Peter Christy, research fellow for Jupiter Research. "When we get beyond it all, the idea that the Internet turns into a very personal information service will be a compelling value."

Lucent's strategy starts at personalizing the Internet for corporate use.

"The Internet is not the de facto network for enterprise business communications because it's a best-effort transport network," Gale said. "The new service intelligent network adapts to the needs of the users and even the applications. The network works with the available resources to make sure the individual needs are met dynamically."

Nortel has "multiple layers [where] we can identify you as a user," Hickey said. "In the consumer context, those would be things like bandwidth shaping on the fly to do things like download high-bandwidth video. In the enterprise space, it could be the ability to have a secure connection from a branch office into your corporate e-mail system."

Both companies' IP strategies use a high-octane Internet that is being reshaped by DSL and cable modem services and where bandwidth is a commodity on which services are added.

"[Voice service providers] invest in a technology platform and then deploy revenue-generating services and software additions to that platform. We're taking that model from the voice world into the IP world," said Hickey.

It's more than rhetoric; it's survival.

"The Internet is a changing landscape in all dimensions, and despite what happened in the stock market in the last year, it's probably best not to think we're anywhere near the end game. This is still the beginning and lots of stuff is in flux," Christy said.