Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Cloud Director APAC, Steve Saunders
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has appointed Steve Saunders to the newly created role of Cloud director for the Asia Pacific region.
Saunders will be responsible for developing and driving the company’s Cloud strategy and spearheading its effort to become a major Cloud player in enterprise communications solutions and services.
“We want to change the way customers will be buying technology from us,” said Saunders.
“We think that also influence how they buy technology from other vendors in the future.
“We will remain 100 per cent channel focussed, but also want to introduce some sort of risk reward to partners to develop their Cloud capability and reduce the barrier to entry.”
Saunders explained that the company intended to introduce a risk sharing model so partners would not have to invest an inordinate amount of money up front for Cloud deployments.
“For partners that are not already in the Cloud, we will share some of the cost burden for getting there. We will then take a portion of the profit from those Cloud deployments,” he said.
“There are partners out there that can’t afford the million dollar investment and twelve month ramp up period for Cloud. We will help them do that, but we will share the revenue and reward as well.”
Saunders said his key areas of focus will be in the hospitality, education, health and government sectors.
“We have already been successful in Hospitality, where we created a specific commercial model. What we want to do now is find other markets where we can create models relevant to those customers,” he said.
“This will allow both the partner and the customer to flex up and flex down as they need to.”
Saunders said he saw the aged care sector as a key area for growth and that the company would be heavily focussed on the market segment.
“With the disruption that is going on in aged care at the moment through the change in Government policy, the aging population and the move from aged care in public facilities to aged care in the home, there is a big opportunity for us to deliver communications technology to those home care residents,” he said.
Saunders said he had been in the role for the past eight weeks. During this time he had focussed on developing the firm’s Cloud strategy.
He joined Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise from partner firm UXC Connect.
