N + I: ‘Borderless enterprise’ offers opportunity for enterprising carriers

LAS VEGAS--

Increasingly, large and small businesses alike need to embrace the concept of the ‘borderless enterprise’ in order to provide better service to their customers and to make their own operations more efficient and cost-effective.

So said Serge Tchuruk, chairman and CEO of Alcatel, this morning during his opening keynote at Networld + Interop.

Tchuruk said he came to this conclusion after watching his company open a regional headquarters in Shanghai, China. “Managing a large area like Asia-Pac from one location is a real headache. It’s a big place,” he said.

To do so, Alcatel managers would travel often to Shanghai for important meetings. While it was critical to do so at the time, Tchuruk fretted about the time that was being taken from serving customers. The solution was to develop an IP-based e-management center that would enable web conferencing and the real-time sharing of critical data. The center was connected to Alcatel facilities in Paris and Dallas. The result was a 50% reduction in travel.”

“Managers could run their businesses without leaving their offices. That was enormous,” Tchuruk said.

The secret to the borderless enterprise is connecting a corporation’s local area network to its wide area network, which would give enterprises to share important data not only within its structure, but also with customers as well.

“Instead of a walled fortress designed to keep proprietary information in, enterprises need to create a network that functions like a membrane that allows information to flow seamlessly in and out of the enterprise,” he said.

Such a creation would have a tremendous impact on customer relationship management, Tchuruk said. “The whole enterprise needs to act as contact centers. All employees need to get involved with customer interaction.”

Norman Wright, executive vice president for Home Shopping Network, in taped remarks, agreed and said his company has embraced the borderless enterprise concept. “People have a choice when they shop. We don’t have a monopoly, and we don’t have them locked up. So we have to make sure they have a good experience,” he said.

Tchuruk said that service providers and carriers that recognize this need in their customers would create a great deal of opportunity for themselves.

“Enterprises want to do this but they are beginning to recognize that they can’t do it by themselves,” he said. “There is a great deal of financial pressure on enterprises to focus on their core competencies and turn over the management of their networks to people who are really good at it.”

Tchuruk acknowledged, however, that enterprises have a great deal invested in their legacy equipment and said that equipment vendors and carriers both would have to focus on solutions that are interoperable and which can be layered on top of existing network.

“Our capital-constrained world requires evolutionary solutions, not fork-lift upgrades.”