Conversation with Laura Merling about APIs at ALU

Transcript for Conversation With Laura Merling About APIs at ALU

Dave Michels: Hi, this is Dave Michels. I am here with Laura Merling, the Senior Vice President of API Platform and Strategy at Alcatel-Lucent. Hello Laura.

Laura Merling: Hi Dave.

Dave Michels: Gluecon is a conference largely about APIs, apps, and integration and I think Alcatel-Lucent largely is a hardware company. Why is AL-U here as a sponsor?

Laura Merling: That is a great question. So what we believe is that there is a need to make the network become a platform. Meaning, how do you expose all the assets available to service providers today that they typically use to run their own business and expose them to third parties so they can actually build applications on top of the network, so to become the network as a platform, and that’s why we are here.

Dave Michels: Well when you talk about that, there are other companies that are doing API and cloud infrastructure, what does Alcatel-Lucent bring to this dogfight?

Laura Merling: Yeah, so there are a couple of things that we bring to the dogfight. First of all, a lot of the equipment and where the information comes from in the network is our equipment, right – so that’s at the starting point. Secondly, when you think about how network APIs need to be exposed, there are things that are different or expected to be different from a large service provider or even a large enterprise for that matter. Things like traffic control or SLAs around an API. So different expectations in terms of how they get managed. So it’s having that experience and understanding of the network and building that into the API infrastructure.

Dave Michels: Alcatel-Lucent is on the carrier and the enterprise side, where are you?

Laura Merling: Exactly, we kind of sit in the middle. So what we do is we provide infrastructure to both carriers and service providers because there is actually a really good marriage between the two. A lot of the service providers that we talk to that want to expose APIs, are looking to expose them to enterprises so that they can build interesting applications for business-to-business or business-to-business-to-consumer to improve what they do as part of running their business for their enterprise.

Dave Michels: Well, you talk about consumer. When I hear APIs, I hear – I think of things like Google, GoogleMaps, Netflicks, Twitter – is this your focus?

Laura Merling: No, no. Our focus is more things like – so out of the network you get things such as subscriber context, which includes everything from their location to their presence to their identity and it really makes it interesting. There are other things like quality of service and being able to offer those as a differentiated service. So those are the things out of the network. And then on the enterprise side, it might be things like exposing a large airline’s entire flight schedule. Or it might be things like exposing things like their loyalty program and then combining that with network services.

Dave Michels: Okay, when you talk about APIs, a lot of the enterprise competitors, the UC vendors, are talking about CEBP or Communications Enabled Business Processes. Is that the same conversation?

Laura Merling: You know, it is to some extent, but it’s looked at a little bit differently. So when we think about enabling the enterprise and business processes, think about it as when you get a call into an IVR today, if you call from your mobile device, wouldn’t it be great if automatically it knew who you were as a subscriber and provided that information into the IVR and said, Okay, this is Laura, she’s calling, and she speaks this language, so you route her to this particular type of agent, and her background and her device are X, Y, or Z, so you can give her better customer service. But it’s also things such as, we’ve been working with a large airline and again, they believe that in the next two to three years, their entire business will be run on wireless and Wi-Fi networks. In that type of environment, if you think about it, just like they needed to understand their Ethernet or their standing networks that they had – T1’s and everything. They need to know what was happening in each node. They needed to make sure that things were up and running for their employees. The same thing is going to happen on the wireless network. So normally, the services that we would sell or the APIs that we might sell or appliance that we might sell to a service provider, is now actually needed as a tool set for a large enterprise, so that can manage “their customers” as frontline support to the wireless network.

Dave Michels: Now when you talk about a now all-wireless environment, that’s one trend in the enterprise. Another trend we are hearing a lot about is social networking. Is the social networking and other web uses changing or impacting the way the enterprise functions?

Laura Merling: Yeah it is, both internally and externally. Internally there are high expectations around being able to do it. Many enterprises today have things like instant messaging or messaging – they might have things such as presence. So there are the internal tools that are used, but there are other things that really make a difference. So for example again let’s take the airline example – imagine in an enterprise environment being able to use these social assets with their end consumers. So for example, think about Four Square for a traveler as your way to manage your loyalty program, right? So today I go and I might check in at the hotel that we are at for this conference and I might check in on Four Square, well that really doesn’t do anything for me other than people know where I am and I might get some points. And I am trying to beat my friends on points, however, if it actually worked that way for an airline, the interesting thing is that I could check in through my airline app, I could get loyalty points from the hotel. I might get an offer from the hotel. Maybe I can also use those loyalty points at the hotel in real time. So it makes the loyalty program much more interactive.

So from the network, you would use things like location. You would use things like subscriber identity. You might offer videos to the subscriber as part of a content program, because you want to bring more value to that subscriber and so now you are going to give them differentiated quality of service to their device while they are watching that particular video, while they are traveling. So there are a variety of different things that you can offer, where they would want to incorporate all those social networking things that you see happening out there.

Dave Michels: Do you perceive people trying to combine their personal and work identities or separate them?

Laura Merling: Yeah that is a really good question. I believe most people want to separate them to some level, right? There is information about themselves that they want to keep to themselves or for their family and friends. And then there is information that they want to be made available on the work environment. And that is one of the things is thinking about how you keep an individual persona and then also how you manage that persona within a larger ecosystem. But having that identity in a single place and having someone like a service provider, that’s a trusted entity that knows information about you, is really important and valuable. There are a lot of service providers looking at that as a main option to offer as a service.

Dave Michels: Now another recurring theme here at Gluecon is a lot of these seminars are discussing about how to monetize various APIs but when you talk to an enterprise audience, they are not necessarily trying to monetize the API as much as improve their workflows. How does a cost justification discussion occur with the enterprise?

Laura Merling: I think there are two ways a cost justification happens. If it’s for APIs that they are going to use in an external—to bring more value to their consumer, the value is they can actually track what you call engagement. So you could track consumer engagement and use that measure. If your consumers are engaging with you in more places and on more devices and in more locations, that is one way to measure success and value. And so you can set KPIs based on that.

Another one is that you look at companies like Best Buy. Best Buy opened up their APIs to their catalog to the Best Buy website and interestingly enough the immediate value that they gained was internally with their own teams, they actually were able to deliver about 20% more projects to the market than they had delivered the year before. That’s purely because they now had all the data and all the services accessible that before they did as one-offs for each individual team that needed them – and there was a whole lot of cost justification that needed to happen before. What ended up happening was that they were actually able to deliver a lot more value to their end customers, which were internal customers.

Dave Michels: The last question I want to ask you is when I think of Alcatel-Lucent, I think of the hardware like I mentioned earlier. So how do enterprises find your services?

Laura Merling: A lot of the enterprises find our services – believe it or not Mobile World Congress this year was really interesting for us. There were quite a few large enterprises at Mobile World Congress, which was if you think about it, traditionally it’s been a large service provider space, people that sold things to service providers or people that worked in handsets. But the reality was that the people that showed up there were large enterprises. We came across at least 15 or 20 large enterprises that just stumbled upon our booth. Now in addition to that we do have a large enterprise business, as you know. And so being able to leverage the relationships that we have in existing enterprise environments and taking those and saying okay, we are going to partner you to the same service provider that you normally get services from. Let’s bring the two of you together and figure out what the right strategy is in terms of a “go to market,” for what network APIs you want and what internal APIs you need to expose. So a lot of it is leveraging our existing relationships and access.

Dave Michels: Great, thank you very much Laura.

Laura Merling: All right, thank you Dave.