Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, the former enterprise communications arm of Alcatel-Lucent that is now majority owned by Chinese company Huaxin, has chosen Australia and New Zealand as the first countries, along with Singapore, in which to launch a new business model for providing enterprise fixed and wireless local area network services, dubbed Network on Demand (NOD).
Network on Demand will be sold through Cogent in New Zealand, and through a number of channel partners in Australia including UXC Connect and BTAS.
It is one of three new on-demand offerings ALE is introducing. OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud (OTEC) is a service for the hospitality industry, already being used by Accor Hotels Asia-Pacific that enables hotels etc to provide guest telephone and Internet access services and pay based on room occupancy levels.
The third, Rainbow Workplace, is a cloud-based, unified communications and collaboration offering that will interoperate with PABXes from multiple vendors. It will be available worldwide in Q4 of 2016.
Steve Saunders, ALE’s APAC cloud director, said: “We want change the way our customers buy technology. We want to share the business and investment risk with our customers and our business partners.”
He said Network on Demand had been developed with the experience gained from (OTEC).
“When you bring these things to market you make a lot of mistakes, learn a lot of things and gain a lot of experience,” Saunders said.
Saunders described NOD as “the ability to procure LAN and wireless LAN services purely on a price per connected port per day. There is no cap ex involved. Usage is calculated daily and billed monthly in arrears.” He added: “The technology is not new, it is the same technology we have been developing for some time.”
He said pricing would be a complete pass through with partners, who could add other value services but would charge the service by adding a margin to the usage-based price.
Saunders suggested that the education and hospitality sectors would be receptive to the new business model. “Over the Christmas period there is a three month break with few people on campus. So on average university networks run at 50 per cent utilisation.”
He added: “We will look at vertical markets where we think the NOD model will be very strong. We will look at manufacturing, we will look at healthcare.”