Constant Evolution with Innovation Date:   Saturday , April 05, 2014 Headquartered in Gurgaon, Alcatel-Lucent India is a company that engages in R&D, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Services, Operations and Development of Embedded as well as Application Software for Telecom Networks in the region. In the past decade there have been a lot of innovations and technological development in the telecommunications industry. With all the advances made to the phone besides connecting and talking to people, the phone also allows people to send emails, share pictures and videos and message anyone else with a phone or even a computer. Due to the multitude of devices which are used from a multitude of places there has been a huge data explosion. There has been a huge proliferation and rapid introduction of new and smarter end user devices that allow access to the data explosions thus increasing the data traffic and making it more difficult to manage. The telecom manufacturing industry has also been facing a huge problem as these new and smarter end user devices are available in the market with new operating systems along with varying different interfaces. In order to break this enormous wall, there have been a few technology trends that have come up in order to face these challenges thus increasing the boundary limits for many companies in the telecom industry.Virtualization and Cloud has been one such trend where the enterprises in the IT and Telecom domains have started to put significant focus on how to virtualize more and more software and place on cloud. Another trend is the security where companies are trying to enhance the security in order to keep their confidential and highly valuable data safe. While ensuring that security is given the utmost importance many telecom companies have started to utilize data analytics or mining in order to take advantage of large amounts of marketable data that is available with the operators about the consumer. Many telecom companies that have begun to implement software defined networks have also realized that the world is moving to a new technology known as ultra broadband. The ultra broadband technology allows people to connect from any device in any place to any other device in any other place. With the introduction and implementation of ultra broadband, video communication will become a mode of communication in the near future. The benefit of the implementation of these technologies will help in significant reduction of the carbon footprint and operating costs. However, most vendors in India are not able to provide many of the enterprises with reliable networks at a reasonable price and strong security technologies. By not providing the required bandwidth many companies have not been able to allow their customers the easy use of services across wired and wireless networks on any devices at any place. To counter this huge challenge most equipment manufacturing companies in the telecom industry need to be diverse and have a robust R&D organization. But these organizations also face other multi-faceted challenges and key opportunities when they try to transform the organizations from a Project R&D culture to a Product R&D culture. One such key opportunity and challenge is the leadership transformation where the organization must have the right leaders who understand, embrace and become spokespersons for a cause.While the leader drives a creation of an innovation culture across the organization, he/she must also select the appropriate set of R&D teams to pursue this path. A key aspect of the challenges is to ensure that appropriate training is given to all the employees to grow into different types of roles such as product management, architects, system engineers and others. This can be solved also by cross pollination of ideas and processes. Therefore, the employees will learn from each other and at the same time they will be promoting diversity. While marketing and getting support from the global product unit leaders, it is also important that companies should market themselves effectively by participating more actively in conferences and with universities. While innovation has been a key part of the telecom equipment manufacturing industry, a company drives its employees towards innovation. The company must also ensure that its employees understand the customers; the competition, standards and technology which will help develop a culture of Product Ownership. By encouraging the employees to be passionate about their work, companies must also systematically provide encouragement for innovation through rewards and recognitions. When a company creates a culture, where even people with limited time can participate with others in new ventures or innovation activities, the employees feel overjoyed and put in their best efforts to bring out the perfect products.