Brian Riggs, Principal Analyst, Enterprise

Through 2013 Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALU-E) will roll out a set of solutions on which its partners can offer a range of hosted unified communications (UC) services. The company’s strategy is different to those of its competitors in that it will deliver separate solutions for enterprises and SMBs, as well as a set of application services.

These will be offered to operators, and also sold to value-added resellers and distributors that want to compete not only against telcos’ managed services but hosted services as well.

ALU-E’s hosted UC platform for enterprise-grade services became available earlier this year, with a handful of partners offering services based on it. The SMB platform and application service are in a less mature state; both are still in development, and no service provider partners are associated with them as yet. ALU-E is in a similar position to Avaya, which …