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Published on: March 26, 2009
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Unknown
Length: 12 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Transportation, energy and government organizations have complex communications issues that are necessary to operate their businesses efficiently but are not part of their core business. Communications transformation projects within these industry segments have extensive regulatory, safety, technology, company and industry-specific requirements that necessitate industry expertise from their vendor partners. Companies within these industries typically rely on trusted partners to enable their communications infrastructures.

Companies within these industry segments have different business models and strategies to address their communications transformation projects. There is a spectrum of strategies that are potentially involved in engaging vendor partners to enable transformation projects. At one end of the spectrum, are individual, one-time engagements that can include design, planning, deployment and eventual hand-off to the customer or a subset. At the other end of the spectrum is complete outsourcing for short or very long-term intervals... 20 years plus.

As with any business entity, the companies within this sector have their own threshold for adoption of new technologies, solutions and products with regard to their communications infrastructure; however, the bottom line is that the solutions deployed must be completely reliable and always available. In this regard, these large industries have similar requirements as those of the large communications service providers (CSPs). However, unlike the CSPs, communications services for transportation, energy, and the public sector must be available 100% of the time, whereas CSPs typically build networks with a 99.999% reliability level. Although these industries are not selling communications services to their customers, their communications infrastructure is mission critical to the operation of the business itself. The safety of their employees, their clients and the public, adherence to specific domain regulatory requirements, and the nature of the business itself are all key characteristics of the communications requirements for these industries. An example in the transportation industry is a specific time requirement for response from a railway operator to its base operations center and back to the operator to support safe command of the railway operations and its passengers.

Internal communications of these companies are integral to their business but it is not their primary business and therefore companies typically look to experienced vendors to provide them with proven, tested and reliable communications solutions.

In this Alcatel-Lucent sponsored whitepaper, Stratecast will provide insight into:

1. The communications requirements of three specific industry segments (transportation, energy and the public sector),
   
2. Best practices to deliver the services and manage the projects efficiently, and
   
3. Innovative solutions and strategies deployed by these industry segments.