Lucent Move Sets Cooperation Trend - Company Business and Marketing

From a vendor cooperation perspective, the telecommunications industry has always been friendlier than its cable industry brethren.

"This industry ... is quite incestuous," agreed Jeff Rittichider, VP-worldwide Marketing for Ortel Corp.

Thus, when Lucent Technologies Inc. acquired Ortel's optoelectronics business it was no surprise that it planned to continue serving traditional Ortel customers, even though they are also Lucent competitors.

"I think Lucent has done an outstanding job of managing the whole set of challenges regarding competition," Rittichider said. "There's all manner of cooperation that occurs in this business."

Primarily, it's happening because Lucent has separated its business units, giving each profit and loss responsibility. The Microelectronics Group can garner 75% of its business from customers outside the Lucent family while serving as a primary supplier in-house.

"In many cases, not only with Lucent, you have examples of customers, competitors and vendors all playing in the same space and interacting with each," said Conrad Burke, Lucent's marketing director-optoelectronics products. "There are multiple levels of cooperation."

That, said Dee Dee Nye, VP/GM of Lucent's cable communications group, is a trend that will spread beyond Lucent to more traditional cable television vendors. As an example, she pointed to a cooperative effort between Lucent and rival Motorola Inc. to develop IP telephony systems for Comcast Corp.

"We're Willing to do partnerships, alliances, acquisitions, those types of things for the direct purposes of getting Lucent engaged in the cable industry," she noted. "The more participants we have, the better the technology and the faster all these providers can deploy, the better it is for all of us."

Nye said that while this isn't the way cable vendors have traditionally conducted business it's the way things will happen in the future thanks to industry-supported efforts like CableLabs' DOCSIS, PacketCable and OpenCable projects.

"When we did our strategies, we saw this coming and we knew that we would have to do partnerships and have to do some things that were non-traditional," she said.

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