Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Releases Q3 Report
On November 17, 2020, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) released its Q3 report. While ALE saw increased revenue for its cloud solutions (especially for its UCaaS offering Rainbow), the overall picture was dampened by further global lockdowns and summer breaks.
ALE’s Q3 saw cloud revenues up 37% globally, helped along by its Rainbow solution, and a 3% increase for its overall cloud services. Other positive highlights included:
- UCaaS bill rate up 39% (27% in Q2).
- Paid Rainbow users up 60%.
- Rainbow Voice first deployment in Singapore.
- An increase of 70,000 Rainbow users since Q2, bringing overall ALE cloud users to 2.774 million.
However, ALE certainly felt the brunt of further global lockdowns. Overall global revenue was down 18% from last year’s Q3 and phone demand continued to fall. These figures were regionally split, with the biggest falls in Central/Latin America and APAC:
- Central and Latin America: -51%
- APAC: -31%
- China: -23%
- Northern Europe: -22%
- Southern Europe: -14%
- North America: -2%
France, Germany, and the USA continue to be the top three countries for ALE revenue. New market growth, though, pushed Singapore, Russia, and Portugal into ALE’s top 15 countries for Q3.
Market segmentation did not have any major impact on the fall of global revenues; both SMBs and MLEs were similarly impacted, with SMBs down 16% and MLEs down 21%.
ALE will continue the acceleration of cloud services and new cloud edition SIP phones and focus on mobility due to continued remote work.
Our Take
Info-Tech’s report on ALE’s Q2 performance showed a 51% revenue growth of cloud-based services and a 17% decline in global revenue. Q3 does not reveal any rebounds from that decline, with global revenue down 18% and cloud-based services tapering off at a lower growth of 37%. However, ALE is growing its user base – a position that may poise it for substantial growth in 2021. Indeed, if vaccines for COVID-19 are distributed in early 2021, ALE’s Q4 revenue may show quite the bump.
For the moment, though, there is nothing tangible that stands out for ALE growth over the rest of its financial year. It seems that ALE’s strategy is largely to weather the storm, move into increasing mobility offerings, and develop its CPaaS offerings.
For organizations currently in a position to modernize their telephony system and wondering if ALE’s Rainbow solution is a good fit, use Info-Tech’s Modernize Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure blueprint to structure your process. Indeed, Rainbow appears fifth out of 20 UCaaS solutions reviewed by SoftwareReviews and ought to especially be shortlisted for SMBs.
Source: SoftwareReviews Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow Scorecard. Accessed November 23, 2020