2. Environment Analysis. 2.1 External 2.2.1 Competitors
Challenges are associated with increasing rate of competition in all industries in general and telecommunications industry in particular. Hill (2008) highlights the role of Chinese producers when discussing the issues of global competition, stating that manufacturers from developed countries have a range of disadvantages when competing with Chinese manufacturers because of low prices of workforce in China. Therefore, one of the main challenges for Alcatel-Lucent in the global marketplace would be to maintain competitive, and at the same time to keep the required level of profitability. 2.2.2 Customer 2.2.3 Suppliers

2.2 Internal

2.3.1 Strengths
Firstly, ALU has approached the data center with technology and a message that addresses one of the greatest challenges IT faces in the data center, which is managing the application experience versus the devices and individual elements. This focus is the foundation for the architecture and key to ALU’s entire offering from data center to campus. Secondly, ALU’s new technology partnership with Citrix enables customers to quickly deploy a tightly integrated ALU pod & mesh into an existing Citrix solution , or to plan a new project around Citrix technology. This speeds time to deployment and offers customers a strong L2-L7 solution for desktop virtualization, a Citrix strength. As VDI continues to gain traction in the market, this solution’s value will only increase and pay dividends for Citrix, ALU, and ultimately customers who deploy the joint offering. Thirdly , ALU’s global reach and scale provides customers with reasonable channel and support accessibility, regardless of which country they are in. Though strongest in Europe, ALU has heavily invested in growing its channel and support network in the Americas and Asia. This is of particular importance as customers look to deploy shared service cloud capabilities. Fourthly, The Pod and Mesh architecture proposed by ALU is both simple to deploy and highly scalable. It is ALU’s name for a leaf-spine architecture, and with the throughput and features provided on the OS6900 and OS10K in particular, scales up to 14,400 access ports with just two core switches. For many data centers, this is a sufficient number of access ports to accommodate growth for the life of the data center. The 40GbE availability demonstrates ALU’s commitment to delivering high performance networks for modern data centers. Next, Full interoperability with existing infrastructures enables deployment and transition to the mesh/pod architecture without requiring a wholesale replacement, thus preserving investment and easing customers into a full fabric architecture gracefully. Lastly, The benefits of the vNP are scale and simplicity by assigning a profile that automatically understands the requirements of an application across security and access control, VLAN assignments, quality of service levels, relative priority of the application to other applications, latency and jitter requirements. Once configured the vNP can be applied automatically due to shared awareness of the application through integration with the virtualization management console.

2.3.2 Weakness

Firstly, as with most modern, virtualization enabling network architectures, ALU’s solution depends on an edge to edge data center capable of vNP application and control. In ALU installed base accounts, this won’t present as much of an issue as the AFN solution works on many of the OS members, however, in mixed vendor environments the value would be inhibited or severely limited (though a single pod still offers value, it is less than the whole of the mesh/pod proposal). Secondly, ALU has invested significantly in its support and channel networks, however, the number of support partners still pales compared to some competition. These solutions are nearly certain to require some assistance at some point and having rapid access to competent support personnel is critical. After all, the data center is the most sensitive and important element within IT today. Lastly, ALU still suffers from brand visibility and awareness in the enterprise beyond its core optical and carrier strengths. Though this is mostly a perception and awareness issue, it does influence and result in a growth inhibitor for ALU.

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