Alcatel-Lucent Never Forgets

Can an elephant dance? That's the question Ben Verwaayen is pondering these days, some five months into his reign as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. During the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, Verwaayen elaborated on the major strategy changes he unveiled in December by detailing the three distinct ways in which the megavendor will seek partners to do the things it can't do as well itself — a dancing partner that can lead.

Alcatel-Lucent will partner to gain credibility and presence in the enterprise IT space, to manage legacy products through the end of their life cycles, and — perhaps most carefully — to benefit from the pioneering work of new start-ups. For enterprise IT, Alcatel-Lucent will look to the existing world leaders in that space. Legacy R&D, likewise, would be trusted to experts large enough to serve Alcatel-Lucent's vast installed customer base (in a practice Verwaayen called “co-sourcing”). But as for start-ups, the vendor recently tasked its Bell Labs research division with scanning the market for innovative newcomers and working with them, and it has asked the same of its carrier product group, helmed by Phillippe Keryer, who previously led the vendor's GSM and WiMAX access businesses.

“This is probably one of the most difficult things to do because it is the fundamental question, ‘Can an elephant dance?’ and the answer is yes, but it's very noisy,” Verwaayen said. “If you're a start-up company, would you like to put yourself next to the big elephant with the big feet saying, ‘Let's go and dance together?’ You need to make sure you're nimble and humble in the way you approach it, in the same way as they come to you.”