This paper will analyze Lucent Technologies, a three-year old (or a 125-year old) company in an attempt to determine whether it is Adriving@ the Internet or, whether the phenomenal growth of the Internet is driving the company.
Elstrom and Rheinhardt address this question in their lengthy Business Week analysis (1999). Describing the Internet, they state AIts explosive traffic, combined with the oodles of data that corporations are zapping between offices, demands speedy networks that can chop up information into bite size digital pieces that wing their way fast. What's more, this new equipment is so efficient that it may eventually carry both data and voice traffic@ (Elstrom & Rheinhardt 1999 111).
That, in a nutshell, is the primary reason for Lucent Technologies existence and its success.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronics components.
One particularly lucrative product segment is its WaveStar(TM)OLS 80G, a Ahigh capacity dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system that combines up to 16 wavelengths, or channels, on one fibre pair each with 2.5 gigabit per second (Gb/s) capacity. DWDM enables carriers to increase the capacity of fibre optic networks by transmitting information as different wavelengths/colors of light on the same fibre@ (ALucent deploys@ 1999). Its primary customers for this DWDM have been major telephony companies such as AT&T, US West, Bell Atlantic and Time Warner Telecom in America; BT of the UK; NETs of France, and Worldport and KPN in the Netherlands. ALucent has the largest
share 29 percent of the $2.2 billion global DWDM market@ (Lucent Deploys@ 1999)
An equally popular and profitable product is the Cajun P330 Switching System, which can best be defined as a new ...