Excerpt: Supercomm IEC
(6-8-1999)
"We believe the way to drive the most value creation for all of our customers is to stimulate and facilitate a new applications development environment where services and content come together in new ways.
"And we fully recognize the critical need that our customers have to see innovative applications roll out as quickly as possible.
In view of these critical considerations, Lucent has recently made some important decisions about the way we serve the market.
"When I talk about these changes with our customers, I say that Lucent has crossed the Rubicon. What I mean by that is that we are taking bold action, having recognized the need to change from a vertical, proprietary industry – to a horizontal view of customer solutions, much as the computer industry has changed itself over the past two decades.
"In our case, crossing the Rubicon means that we’re opening the interfaces on our hardware and network elements. It means we acknowledge that customers have – and will continue to have – multi-vendor networks. It means that we know they’re not willing to throw away what they’ve already bought. As the revolution in technology goes on, you can’t rip everything out and start over every three years. Therefore, agility and flexibility are key. So that you can in fact be adding over time new or different components to this network. From us or somebody else.
"But most of all, crossing the Rubicon says we’re committed to giving customers new ways to compete and to create value – as the old value propositions based on time and distance become less relevant. That’s why Lucent is taking a lead in driving the development of new applications, and giving a jump start to what we expect will be a very, very large and very innovative community of new independent application developers. The horizontal solutions they create will be critical to delivering the vision of a next generation network architecture that’s truly open.
A lot of people talk about open architecture. When they do, you need to really stop and clarify what they mean. Most IT people think of open architecture as UNIX and NT. Many people see the Internet as open architecture, although in ways that are quite different from what makes an operating system open.
“But here’s what I think 'open' really means: It’s the ability to solve your problems, today, in a multi-vendor world. It’s the ability to acquire applications from a wide range of third party developers. It’s the ability to evolve as technology advances, and to continue to satisfy your needs at the leading edge of technology. And it’s doing it all in a way that preserves options for the future, as opposed to being locked into a particular option or a particular vendor. Some vendors try to claim they areopen because they’re part of the Internet and the Internet is open. Despite their desire to be seen as open – many of their hardware and software products are not open at all, they’re completely proprietary.
“We took a different view of open when we recently unveiled our transition strategy for service providers who own our 5ESS Switch, and would like to use them in the future as next-generation feature servers for packet networks."
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