Market research shows that Brazil and Mexico stand at the brink of economic transformation with consumers and business demanding new and innovative services

Paris – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) announced the launch of the second edition of The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World, which examines the developing ecosystem of service providers, developers and advertisers and addresses how business models can adapt to the pace of technology.  Building off extensive market research in North America, the second edition incorporates new market research from Brazil and Mexico, and highlights how thousands of Latin American application developers are ready to help lead this technology transformation through new business models created with service providers to deliver rich new services aimed at consumers and small businesses with a commensurate willingness to pay.

With a combined 280 million mobile users, Brazil and Mexico are two rising stars in the global emerging markets landscape according to the book’s primary and secondary market research. Consumers in these countries have a healthy appetite for services incorporating network-based functionality, like presence, location, profiling and Quality of Service (QoS), making them prime development hubs for enhanced end users services – especially in entertainment and security. With hundreds of thousands joining the developer ranks worldwide each year, there is a rapidly growing population of apps builders ready and willing to leverage the service provider network as a platform for building and delivering exciting new voice, data, multimedia and video services.

“In the second edition of The Shift we expanded our market analysis to Brazil and Mexico, the two powerhouses in Latin America, to understand how additional value is inserted into the ecosystem when service providers expose intelligent network capabilities,” said Allison Cerra, head of marketing for Alcatel-Lucent Americas and one of the book’s authors. “Our data confirmed that end users, developers, advertisers and service providers can all benefit from an approach where consumers have control of their experience, developers have access to enhanced capabilities, and service providers monetize their investments to fuel future innovation.”

Sample key findings:

With extremely high mobile penetration and one of the world’s largest online populations, Latin America is well posed to capitalize on the mobile broadband growth wave fueled by 3G networks. The book’s research shows that the region’s consumers, developers and small enterprises are willing to pay for network-based, service enhancements which provide broad societal benefits. Among the book’s findings:

•         Consumers - Like their North Americas counterparts, Latin American consumers have a highly trusted relationship with their service provider when it comes to the sharing of their personal information, such as presence, location, online habits and billing. The most attractive service opportunities for them include: Advanced Caller ID reflecting the location and social networking status of the incoming caller; Gaming applications that provide consumers with the profile capabilities of other gamers who match their skills set; Services such as allowing the storage of familial records and entertainment files to the network and detecting when a family member has arrived home based on the location of one’s mobile device

•         Small Business – As the growth engine of any sustainable economy, approximately 90% of Latin American small businesses are attracted to service providers that can offer advanced network services, such as enhanced QoS, security and seamless connectivity creating improved communication and collaboration.

•         Developers – Latin America has the second highest growth rate for developers in the world, behind only Asia Pacific. Time is the intangible currency that unites them with their global counterparts so they are willing to pay for bundled network functionality when it reduces the applications development cycle and accelerates the path to revenue. Discoverability, not reach, matters most to developers, so they are strongly attracted to marketing options that increase their chances of breaking through the cluttered application marketplace. The vast majority are willing to trade exclusivity with a service provider for greater discoverability benefits.

Cerra and the book’s co-author, Christina James, who also supports Alcatel-Lucent marketing, spent more than a year analyzing market research to illustrate how a collaborative communications ecosystem –where the intelligent networks of service providers are leveraged — addresses the complexities created by today’s industry fragmentation and an exploding demand for bandwidth and 2.0 service access anytime, anywhere and over any device. The second edition of The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World can be obtained at www.theshiftonline.com.