ALE International, operating under the brand Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, is commemorating its one year anniversary as an independent business by celebrating milestones around its corporate mission, strategic market investments, continued success in innovation, industry recognition and customer loyalty.

Since October 1, 2014, ALE (the company) has had the complex task of creating a new infrastructure to operate as a fully independent company. To date, the company has implemented a new HR infrastructure, IT/IS systems, new financial infrastructure, new employee and business partner training system and has opened many new offices and legal entities worldwide, well ahead of industry norms. 

The ALE corporate mission

The company has also launched a new corporate mission based on the “Personalised Connected Experience” and outlined a series of growth strategies to support the goal of doubling the business in the coming years. This mission is based on three guiding principles:

• Solutions that deliver connected experiences – The real value for customers and their end users is when technology enables them to easily use it and connect how/when/where they want to.

• Innovation that drives business growth – Every business investment is defined by its outcome. Technology must help businesses grow and achieve tangible business outcomes.

• Open collaboration for shared success – Successful technology integration, operation and outcome requires true collaboration between people and organisations. Shared success for those that deploy, manage and use technology is achieved through an outcome-based approach.

Strategic market investments

New strategic go-to-market programs have been implemented with a focus on core markets in APAC and EMEA while additional resources have been added to further execute in growth markets including China and the USA. These initiatives are already delivering, with market share growth in Northern Europe, France, Iberia, Australia, The Gulf and various other geographies in the first half of 2015. In addition, several initiatives were launched to support growth opportunities:

• New Value for Partners program: The new Value for Partners (V4P) program helps resellers to reach more customers and build revenue with new models, while helping enterprises harness the evolution of technology and achieve tangible business outcomes. The V4P program sets out to cut the cost of doing business with ALE, boost revenue and expand training via automation and simplification.

• New Hospitality business unit: A new Travel, Hospitality and Leisure Solution Business Unit was created in Q2/2015, with the goal of being one of three top global players in the hospitality IT sector over the next three years. The unit delivers solutions for the hospitality industry that enable guests to use their mobile services to access hotel services, and control the environment in their hotel rooms for more a personalized guest experience and has already driven 25% growth for the company.

• Expanding traction with its Cloud solutions: ALE has signed with  more than 20 partners world-wide to launch its Cloud offerings. The latest are EWE Tel (Germany), Huber & Feneberg (Germany), and Intelecom (Norway) to support its OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud and/or OpenTouch Personal Cloud solution, which enables partners to deliver business-outcome based Unified Communication services.

Heritage of innovation

Over the past 12 months, new Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise technologies have been introduced that further illustrates its innovation engine:

• Intelligent Fabric technology, simplifies complex networks operations through automated installation and operation to bring business agility to the network;
• Advanced collaboration features on the 8088 Smart DeskPhone provide employees more productivity opportunities;
• Collaborative applications on OpenTouch for SMB Suite provide better communications tools to help businesses grow; and
• The OpenTouch Notification Servcies alarm and notification system offers businesses the ability to deliver improved safety which affects lives and the bottom line;
• Expanded OmniSwitch® LAN and OmniAccess WLAN portfolios to support the increased mobility and bandwidth demand of enterprise’s network infrastructure.

“We specially commemorate this one year anniversary in South Africa with our newly formed local legal entity taking occupation in our new premises – 44 on Grand in Midrand, Johannesburg. This solidifies our plans to become a significant player in the local South African and African market by enhancing the technologies we bring to these markets. The expansion of our local team further highlights ALE investments into its local business. In the last year we have actively demonstrated our leadership capabilities in the technologies that we deliver to the enterprise market,” said Ravin Naidu, Regional Director for Sub Saharan Emerging Africa at ALE.

2015 Awards and recognition

Customers and analysts alike have found ALE solutions to be worthy of recognition with the following awards:

• Excellence in Network Services Support awarded by TSIA
• Winner Best of Interop Award for Networking: Intelligent Fabric
• Das Büro Magazine CeBIT Oscar for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Smart Deskphones –
• “Very Strong”: Data Center Switching Infrastructure – Application Fluent Network –
• Improvements in both innovation and execution in the latest Gartner® MQ for both Unified Communication and Wired and Wireless LAN MQ’s