Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
Connecting the World with Holistic IoT Solutions

Turning a 100 years old next year, the Alcatel-Lucent legacy has had a major role in the global network and communication marketplace. Branched out to focus particularly on the enterprise market and its networking needs, Alcatel- Lucent Enterprise (ALE) today serves over 830,000 customers in over 50 countries as well as has more than 2,100 employees and 2,900 resellers.

One of the key topics that the company is interested in is the IoT sector. As the mobility explosion transformed the way public organizations collaborate internally and interact with their targets (citizens, residents, tourists), ALE recently adapted its cloud-based Rainbow solution to offer borderless collaboration between public sector employees, contractors and citizens, and included processes, connected objects and chat bots into the conversation. According to David Fortini, Director of business development for the Government sector at ALE, in this connected world, IoT has the potential to transform the public sector by profoundly altering how government entities gather data and information, and by bringing together the significant technical and business trends of mobility, automation, and data analytics. However, IoT introduces the risk of cyberattacks, which public sector organizations simply cannot afford to fall prey to. ALE addresses this through a multi-level security approach that offers protection at the individual user, device, and network level. They institutionalize an IoT containment strategy to prevent cyberattacks on government systems by securing the onboarding process of devices and deploying the right network resources to run the systems efficiently.

On top of this, the lack of a skilled IoT workforce in government organizations due to less funding proves to be yet another pain point. ALE’s Interop Award-winning technical solution, the Intelligent Fabric, or IFab, tackles this pain point by automating various manual tasks to simplify a network’s design, deployment, and operations. This smart solution includes self-configuration in the installation phase, self-attachment of various components such as access switches into a network, and it can also adapt to any change in the network, with self-healing capabilities that eliminate network downtime.

ALE offers Distributed Intelligence, a unique wireless technology, which as a virtual controller allows the traffic from the access point to go directly to its destination using the fastest and shortest route available on the network. In case a cable, access point, or switch fails in a network, the solution easily re-configures the network, allowing complete efficiency and lower latency without a single point of failure. The Location Based Services (LBS) Solution from ALE is yet another wireless solution which enables services such as way-finding and geo-notification, empowering enterprises to gather relevant information about their visitors’ and staffs’ locations. Both these wireless technologies facilitate effortless deployment and provide scalability for small and large enterprises.

In the case of Rawabi—the first planned smart city built for and by the Palestinians; the city project faced practical difficulties during the construction, forestalling progress. A smart city that has to be managed through a single network system requires communication solutions that are reliable, secure, redundant, and fast and easy to deploy and scale for quick growth. ALE’s customizable, converged solutions and expertise were chosen to enable digital public services like: eGovernment, smart energy and transportation, or emergency notifications to the residents. The capability to easily scale according to the anticipated future growth of the city was another key argument.

ALE provides holistic solutions to all its clients, with a sole network management system that utilizes a single operating system for all products to facilitate easy provisioning and deployment, whether on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud. The proven product portfolio supports smart city functions such as transportation and metering as well as MACsec standards.
ALE plans to move forward in its path of success by providing innovative and niche solutions to its clients. “We will continue developing innovative technologies such cloud-based communications, IFab and IoT containers, to help reduce operational costs for our customer,” concludes Fortini.