By Laura Merling, Senior Vice President, Application Enablement, Alcatel-Lucent   

Laura Merling, SVP, Application Enablement

Today we announced the launch of the API Lifecycle Methodology, a new application programming interface (API) consulting and professional services practice and an associated methodology. 

This announcement comes on the heels of several projects with our customers ranging from detailed competitive analysis across the API landscape to architecture and design work, as well as API performance optimization.  We have taken the best practices across telecommunications and merged them with the lessons learned from the global API ecosystem to create an offering that allows communications service providers to identify new revenue opportunities and deliver new services to market faster.   

The new consulting and professional services practice is built on the back of our uniquely qualified and experienced team of veterans in API implementation, strategy and operations, as well as the key lessons learned and best practices gleaned from our engagements over the past years. 

Coupled with the API Lifecycle Methodology – which we have licensed under Creative Commons and made freely available to the larger API community - the new practice is designed to address the challenges developers, internal or external, face when integrating APIs and to help optimize an API program for success. 

APIs are no longer new to the telecommunications industry, but their true potential as a game-changer remains untapped. Operators are looking to APIs as a strategic means of internal innovation, shortening time-to-market and lowering costs for delivering new services while identifying new revenue streams in the process. With application providers having seized the end-user experience, now is the time for operators to redefine and reinvigorate their role in the value chain.  

When thinking about APIs, the most important thing to remember is that they are not a technology for squeezing revenue out of existing business models. They engender new ones. No company gets it right all the time, but the most successful of them are continuously improving their API ecosystems.   

APIs are the glue that ties together all the elements of the data economy – apps, the cloud and big data. But launching and supporting a dynamic API strategy is not easy – these programs need to be monitored, nurtured and directed as they evolve over time.   

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Mariano Legaz, Verizon’s VP of Supply Chain Services

To be an industry leader in Corporate Responsibility, Alcatel-Lucent has high expectations of its suppliers and the critical role they play within our global supply chain. In turn, our customers, like Verizon, expect the same from us. Verizon’s Mariano Legaz recently met with Alcatel-Lucent suppliers to share how Verizon leads by example – and underscores the importance of every link. Read more from him in this post:

At Verizon, it is our belief that delivering long-term business results is just as important as delivering long-term social value. As our company Credo states, “We are good corporate citizens and share our success with the community to make the world in which we work a better place than it was yesterday.”

If you took a look under the hood of Verizon’s industry-leading products and services, you’d see that sustainability and responsibility is at the foundation of how we do business

We operate one of the largest commercial fleets in the world, and now have about 3,000  alternative-fuel vehicles. This, along with purchasing more efficient vehicles helped us reduce our fuel consumption by 13 percent in 2011, and by 14.7 million gallons since 2009. All new networking equipment from our vendors is now required to be at least 20 percent more energy efficient than previous models. Did you recently have FiOS installed in your home? If you did, your TV set-top boxes are 30 percent more efficient than previous models. And we’re not just making your home more efficient – our many office buildings and datacenters are using smart building technology that has resulted in a reduction of 55 million kilowatt hours in energy reduction per year.

All in all, since 2009, we’ve reduced our carbon intensity – the amount of energy we use to transmit a terabyte of data – by more than 30 percent. By 2020, we’ll have reduced it by 50 percent.

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Passengers traveling to the United Kingdom on the Shuttle or on the Eurostar train, will now be able to use their mobile phone when they pass through the Channel Tunnel. This technological feat has been made possible in record time by Alcatel-Lucent working with French operators Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and the Eurotunnel teams.

Just days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in London, Eurotunnel has announced the successful deployment of mobile phone services in the Channel Tunnel. The cutting edge technology was developed in record time and many technological challenges had to be solved for a successful deployment.

As a result, passengers – professional or tourists – will now be able to use their mobile phones and access entertainment and information services while they are traveling in the Channel Tunnel. The tunnel is 53 kilometers long and it takes approximately 35 minutes to pass through the Tunnel from one side to the other.

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Marie Thérèse Royce, Senior Director International Public Affairs for the Americas

By Marie Thérèse Royce, Senior Director International Public Affairs for the Americas. Marie was in Haiti following the earthquake and provides us here with an  update about a new submarine cable which will accelerate Haiti’s recovery and growth.

I was working 400 miles away from Haiti, the day of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that caused significant damage and loss of life more than two years ago.  As the weeks passed, I was invited to be a part of a delegation, convened and hosted by the U.S. Chamber’s Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC), who met with leaders from the Haitian government and leading NGOs during a trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.  I represented Alcatel-Lucent to Haiti as part of the delegation. Our group of companies worked to gain a better understanding of the Haitian leadership’s redevelopment priorities and sought to engage in long-term recovery activities such as in-country relationship building and international volunteerism.

It became clear that access to information and communication networks is now an essential part of the basic infrastructure needed for socio-economic development. After the recovery, the country was an illustration that ICTs are nearly as important as access to clean water and transportation.

Alcatel-Lucent is now giving the country a further boost by installing an undersea cable which will connect it to the global economy through broadband services.

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By Laurent Le Gourrierec, Head of M&A Advisory Group, Alcatel-Lucent

Big day today with the launch of a new venture fund dedicated to telecoms!

Managed by Innovacom, one of the top five VCs in France, the Technocom 2 fund will provide over €30m in seed funding for new start-ups in France in areas including next generation networks, M2M, cloud, big data and other areas of interest to us.  Between 15-20 companies will be launched over the next 3-4 years from this fund.

We are investing alongside Orange, Group SEB and Soitec with a hefty chunk of government funding from CDC Entreprises.  The launch of this fund represents another powerful example of co-creation for Alcatel-Lucent with our close customers and other industrial partners.  Increasingly, companies are realizing that there is need to address and manage innovation originating outside of their traditional R&D structures.  Venture funds, incubators, joint collaborations are becoming the norm in the IT and telco industries with announcements almost every day.  AT&T has the Foundry initiative that we are also involved in, Orange recently launched another €300m late stage investment fund alongside Publicis for applications and web commerce, Saudi Telecom have just launched a €100m fund (also in France), Vodafone, DT, Qualcomm & Google all have their own active corporate funds etc.

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