Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise recently appointed Pierre Samson, formerly of French telco Orange, as vice president of sales for the Asia-Pacific region.
He has more than 12 years’ experience in the IT and unified communications industry. His most recent position was the chief operating officer and chief sales officer at Lexsi, a cyber security specialist that was acquired by Orange last year. Samson was appointed deputy managing director of Orange Cyberdefense following the merger.
Having spent most of his career in Paris in various positions across the Orange group, Samson’s role at Alcatel-Lucent brings a change of scenery, with the position based in Singapore.
iTWire caught up with the distinctly French gentleman for an update on the past few months “down under”
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Welcome to Australia – what brings you here?
When I took the position the first thing I did was to start organising visits to all the key markets in the region. It is very important for me to be on the ground – meeting customers, partners and employees to understand their unique challenges and objectives. Australia is a very important market for us. It’s a market of early adopters and we see many growth opportunities here.
You’ve been in the role a couple of weeks now – what are some of the biggest differences between APAC and Europe?
Europe is a mature market with very little leeway for players. APAC is a growing market with huge potential. A strong product with a good convergence story can offer a compelling value proposition to customers.
What are your key objectives for the region in 2017 and beyond?
Growth. Last year’s restructuring at ALE was designed to focus on industries where there are most growth opportunities – acceleration of adoption of a business model and the cloud. We see the cloud as a big driver of this growth, particularly in the APAC region which is already our fastest growing region in the world.
We’ve launched several solutions and products over the last year which are going to be a key vehicle of growth including Rainbow, our cloud-based business communications solution. What makes Rainbow different is that it isn’t just a Unified Communications-as-a-Service, but it’s also a Communications Platform-as-a-Service.
We have open APIs for developers to create applications to allow B2B and B2C communications. We’ve over 50 APIs for chat, video, and provisioning services, including telephony, messaging, voice apps, storage, authentication and AI. Working with our partners to develop consumption via these APIs will drive cloud uptake for us.
What is Australia’s role in the region?
Australia is a crucial market for us for many reasons. For starters, it is a nation of early adopters. Australia was the first to truly embrace virtualization, and cloud penetration has been high.
From a company perspective, A/NZ leads the world in adoption of our new business models relating to consumption and cloud. And ALE is lucky to have some incredibly strong partners in Australia who understand the role that cloud will play in our growth; our Australian partners also understand the role of on-premise and how connecting the two can lead to the best outcome for customers. We also have strong partners who understand the basics like SMB. They are experts in architecturally designing the best solution and supporting it.
What changes have you made?
We made a few key changes in December 2016. First, we formed four regional sales organizations to better serve our local partners, customer, and their markets. These regions are Asia, North America, EMEA North and EMEA South. Each region will have its own sales strategy and services delivery environment. Second, these newly created regional organizations are aligned to service key industries: Hospitality, Healthcare, Transportation, and Education. We also have a special vertical focus on Government in APAC.
In Australia, we already have some strong customer references aligned to many of these verticals. We already work with several government organizations and we have world-leading solutions in place in the hospitality industry.
Take Accor Hotels, for example, we have worked with Accor and partner UXC Connect, to deploy a solution whereby we are billing per occupied room per night rather than a typical CAPEX or leasing model. So, we win when they win, and we also share the risk. These changes are going to create even more opportunities for our partners to develop solutions which align most closely with their customer’s businesses.
How will partners benefit from the changes?
As always, we are a highly-focused channel business – there will be a massive opportunity for partners to specialize with us along these key verticals. We are finding that increasingly, customers are looking for partners that understand the unique needs and challenges they face.
We will be looking for new partners who can specialize with us along those verticals but also work with existing partners on developing our joint go-to-market strategies, which as mentioned will be a primary vehicle of growth for us.
How will customers benefit from the changes?
Our customers will benefit because they will be working with a more focused ALE and a more focused partner ecosystem that truly understands their challenges.
ALE has talked a lot about the cloud, and it’s an integral part of your restructuring, you obviously see it as the future. Is on-premise still important?
On-premise is and probably always will be, a huge part of our business globally. However, to continue our growth trajectory – and to be sustainable – we need to look at how our customers can benefit from the cloud. We see a hybrid model as the way forward for most of our customers. One of our taglines is to connect everything, and this is certainly true when it comes to connecting the on-premise with the cloud.
What is your message to Australian partners and customers on working with you through this transition?
With the new ALE, we are more focused and energized, and will work with you to make a difference. With our verticalized solutions, we can offer a strong value proposition to our customers and partners. This will help us further enforce our position in the market. Our sales staff will be specialized and our complete organization will support them. This will help our partners service our customers better.