NEWS & VIEWS: "We are now ready for fixed-mobile convergence"

As different telecom operators strive towards increasing the opportunities to
leverage their existing support systems to offer new services and become a
one-stop shop-convergence of fixed and mobile is one area that is likely to
gain momentum in the coming months. Anil Srivastava, executive vice president,
EMEA and global accounts at Alcatel's enterprise solutions division (ESD)
spoke about Alcatel's focus and about areas where future growth is likely to
come from. Excerpts:

What kind of vision does Alcatel's ESD have for its global operations
and where does India fit in the schema?

Our vision of tomorrow's communications is driven by customer needs.
According to our philosophy-vision drives technological innovation and its not
the other way round. Broadband is at the core of our global vision and it is
driving communication behavior at the user level.

Different broadband flavors of fixed broadband (DSL), wireless broadband (WiFi)
and mobile broadband (3G) have already started to play a major role in network
designing and deployment.

Anil Srivastava

According to our near-term vision-a convergence is likely to happen between
fixed and mobile for the enterprises. It has already been started with some
carriers in the Europe and the US and India is ideally poised to leapfrog into
the future with this opportunity.

India is hugely important for us and that's why we have a big presence
here. This is probably one of the first times when India has this opportunity to
lead the world with carriers going in for hybrid mobile and fixed networks.

Why is fixed and mobile convergence imminent at the enterprise level? How
are you positioning yourself to tap that?

Business phones have traditionally been rated well down in the technology
spending stakes. The attitude of business owners has often been, 'if it works,
why spend more money on it?' This attitude is fast changing now.

The phone system is now-more than ever-central to an enterprise's
communication with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners.

We are making sure that all our products have five key elements to tap this
upcoming market: location information, voice QoS, embedded video, bandwidth
capability, and security are already embedded in our products. We are now ready
for fixed-mobile convergence, though there are still some regulatory issues
involved in this. I am sure that by the end of 2006, different players would
have started offering hybrid networks worldwide.

How do you plan to realize the vision of unified interactive management
for the enterprise?

We are in the process of incorporating the expertise of contact centers to
every desktop in an enterprise. This includes interfacing it with different
databases, systems like ERP, PLC-providing a voice-enabled business presence.

Unified interactive management (UIM) is targeted towards enhancing
communication with greater access to information and databases while extending
the capability of a contact center to the wider corporate environment. We
believe that this will lead us to shortening the gap in business processes.

We need to integrate voice capabilities in the ERP and other systems-and we
need common standards to achieve that. That's why we have started to work
closely with worldwide vendors like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Seibel to create
common standards for us to voice enable different business processes.

Zia Askari, CyberMedia
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