Last Thursday, Alcatel Lucent was holding its Innovation Days 2008 in Paris. This is, as the name suggests, an annual event which gives Bell Labs the opportunity to present to Alcatel Lucent customers, employees, analysts and the press a set of technologies, applications or service concepts that it thinks are the most promising.
As an analyst, part of your job is to anticipate future trends, but it’s not always easy because few vendors and/or telcos are as open about their own approach to the future as you’d like. To me, this was a nearly unique opportunity (as far as I know, none of Alcatel Lucent’s competitors hold similar events) to actually see and form an opinion on what may shape the telecom landscape of tomorrow.
Over the course of one morning, I was subjected to dozens of demos or concepts, and it was as exciting as it was brain-frying. I’m not going to go through the whole list of them, but just highlight those which I thought were promising, exciting, or thought provoking. The floor was organised in eight sections. Four of these were applications put in a usage context, namely home usage, mobile usage, enterprise usage and green Alcatel Lucent. The other four sections were more “under the hood” approaches to traffic management (control), communications, data speed and quality (bytes) and services.
The environment that I was most interested in was the home, but I didn’t find there an answer (or parts of answers) to my big question which is: which are the services that are going to drive the demand for next-generation access. They did have a 3D TV there, which unfortunately is something I can’t quite enjoy since I only see from one eye. But apart from that the mock home environment was not all that impressive.
On the mobile side though, there was some really cool stuff on display:
- the most impressive and immediately applicable was the Mobile Embedded Laser Video Projector. Bell Labs is not quite there yet, but had a working demo of a projector the size of a mobile phone and showed us how small the laser component to be embedded in a mobile was. Ranked really high on the “I want it now” factor!
- the other really cool app that they had was Tikitag, an RFID system where actions on a PC are associated with a tag. The reader is plugged into your PC and you decide what the PC does when a given tag is passed on the reader. One of the examples shown was how a tag stuck on a teddy bear’s leg would start children music and the tag on the other leg stop it. The tags were everywhere in the floor, for us to request info on a given demo, exchange contacts, etc. This is commercially available already.
In the “Transforming the World” section we saw a couple of really interesting innovations, and perhaps more importantly a concept that Alcatel Lucent wants to supersede “Always On” which is “On When Needed”. Its not the first time I hear about this from a vendor, but that doesn’t make it less crucial. The idea is that the network has to become a lot more elastic, being able to accomodate instand needs of a lot of capacity but also to be able to switch off when not needed. More concrete applications were:
- 3D Heatsinks promise to reduce the energy needed to cool IT components by up to half. When you consider that cooling accounts for 30-50% of energy consumption in IT, the potential impact is huge.
- Bell Labs also works on Wind Powered Basestations. Full independance from the electrical grid is not quite achieved yet, but improvements in wind power efficiency and in energy requirements for base stations make this a promising proposition.
The rest of the floor was devoted to various demos, all very different in nature. Here are three that jumped at me:
- Encrypted Traffic Identification is an interesting alternative to DPI. It uses statistical flow analysis to define a behaviour of a certain type of traffic (P2P, http, voice, etc.) and can identify the nature of a flow with a 2% error without deep packet inspeaction. I think a non-intrusive alternative to DPI is an interesting consideration from a privacy point of view. Of course, if you object to any form of traffic shaping, this is not going to be please you anyway!
- I expected not to be particularly interested in the Personal Content Manager, based on the name alone, but actually I found it one of the more promising services on the floor. I wrote recently about how the trend in telco replication of over the top services baffled me. Personal Content Manager could be a way out of that conundrum: what this does is to aggregate all the content available on all of a user’s content storage areas (whether in the cloud, on the PC or on other connected devices) and make it taggable and searchable. The clever bit is that this aggregation role is actually a lot more legitimate for a telco than for an over the top player…
- I also thought that Contact Me My Way was a really interesting app. Essentially, what it allows a user to do is to embed a clickable communication button in any document online or offline and associate a communication method to it. Say that I give a presentation at a conference and include such a button. I decide that it allows people to call me. When someone clicks on the button, the call is established and I know before I answer that the call was established based on that presentation at that particular conference. And if I don’t want to be bothered anymore, I can just deactivate the button or change the communication method to email. You can find more about this here.
All in all, this was a very interesting event to attend. I also felt that this heralded a change of approach to the market from Alcatel Lucent, another way of engaging their traditional telco customers which, perhaps, is the early result of the new management taking over. Alcatel Lucent is to announce its new strategic plan on Dec. 12th, which will undoubtedly give us a better feel for where they are going!
