Alcatel-Lucent this week took BYOD by the horns with the launch of its Unified Access approach to wired and wireless networks.
The vendor claimed that its Unified Access solution is the first converged, wired and wireless, solution to address networking challenges such as the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and multimedia services among enterprise employees.
Unified Access – an extension to the vendor’s Converged Campus Network solution – offers a selection of secure BYOD services that enable employees and customers to use corporate or personal wired or wireless devices on enterprise networks, Alcatel-Lucent said. This is key to enabling more productive employees and, by extension, more productive organisations, Jan Zuurbier, Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, told CNME.
“What we see in the market right now is a big transformation, and underneath that transformation, there’s a bigger demand on CIOs,” he said. “From our perspective, you need to focus on the user, rather than taking a device-centric or an infrastructure-centric approach.”
Indeed, recalling conversations that he had been having with customers throughout the first two days of GITEX, Zuurbier said that these points are resonating with many regional IT managers and CIOs.
“To give an example, many people think that the device is the most important thing. From our perspective, you don’t have to look at the device – you have to look at the user that is behind it, and understand the way that they’re using the technology. This means that he can use and have access to anything he likes – the device is just a portal,” he explained.
To really push this thinking forward, Alcatel-Lucent has been working with its long-time technology partner, Aruba Networks, to offer a full suite of BYOD services. Alcatel-Lucent claimed that the partnership provided a best-of-breed approach and eliminated vendor lock-in.
Unified Access can be implemented via software upgrades without replacing existing equipment, the vendor added.
