Lucent: Down But Not Out

Frisky070802 writes "Forbes has an article about the "new" Lucent. It discusses how Lucent is trying to follow in the path of IBM by transforming itself from an equipment provider to a provider of services, even to companies using equipment from competitors. Patricia Russo, the CEO, claims that Lucent has turned the corner and proven it can survive. The article quotes a few statistics on just what has survived: for instance, revenues down from $28.9B in FY2000 to an expected $8.9B in FY2004, and headcount dropping from 157K to 32.5K over that time." Lucent has fascinated me, simply because they were so well setup, but then floundered for *years*, but have a great amount of interesting technology at their core.

Comments

Lucent & Apple

[Trurl's Machine]

I have a Lucent Cellpipe DSL modem and Apple Airport Base Station coupled together as my home wireless network router. They work together quite happily but... Airport Base Station just looks great, more like a piece of art than a wireless router. It also runs perfectly silent. Lucent Cellpipe, on the other hand, looks butt-ugly AND IT WORKS LOUD - it constantly hisses and buzzes (I even learned to guess the operating mode from the kind of noise it makes - there's a special kind of hissing when the box is connecting with the PPPoE server, a special kind of hissing when it's connected and everything is OK, a special kind of hissing when WAN goes out of synchro). Obviously, wireless network nodes do not need to look fine and they don't even need to work quiet but... both devices are also a sort of a sample of the general technical culture for both companies. And guess which company's products I'll tend to buy in the future...

What?

[MrPerfekt]

I don't believe people really know what Lucent does. I see one post about "Lucent should use OSS" and another post talking about their Lucent DSL modem.

Lucent had/has their hands in alot of pots. Yeah, they do make DSL modems, but that was just so they had something to offer up when service providers bought their Stinger DSL Concentrator.

Lucent to me was the manufacturer of hardcore ATM equipment as this really was their core business before the CBX500 became aged. Of course, this is just my experience from my job. Lucent is still so big that knowing all the divisions and sub-organizations within it is confusing at best. I'm sure the other organizations within Lucent had their own core business that was pretty successful.

In 2000, we worked with four lines of ATM switches. Today, we still work with 3 of the 4 and nothing really new has been introduced. So pretty much, everybody that needs to buy one has probably bought one already. That's the peril of a hardware company that hasn't introduced anything new or innovative in about 5-6 years.

The optical switches are pretty exciting (but I've never worked with it so I can't speak to the actual models) but I know they are expensive and are overkill for alot of applications so I don't believe they're flying off the shelf.

So what have we left but to become a services company which has been another auxillary department at Lucent for many years. Perhaps you recall Lucent's acquisition of INS in the late 90s. The difference nowadays is that the services arm of Lucent is probably financially more healthy than the hardware manufacturing arms of Lucent.