Alcatel-Lucent, HP team on converged network solutions

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and HP (NYSE: HPQ) today announced a major 10-year global alliance to knit together and jointly market IT and communications technologies for their service provider and enterprise customers. The alliance includes an agreement for HP to manage a large part of Alcatel-Lucent’s IT infrastructure, updating and transforming Alcatel-Lucent’s data centers and other IT operations.

The partnership is being announced at a time when IT and telecom are rapidly converging as service providers try to address the needs of businesses to outsource increasingly complex network operations that, in the all-IP world, combine what have traditionally been separate telecom and IT departments and technologies.

By teaming up, HP and Alcatel-Lucent also may be better positioned to compete with a mutual foe: Cisco Systems, which earlier this month admitted it is directly competing with HP for the server market.

“This does give HP another entre into the service provider market, where Alcatel-Lucent has some pre-established relationships,” said David Passmore, an analyst with the Burton Group.  Passmore cautioned however, that targeting both service providers and enterprises is “trying to have it both ways” and added that small-to-mid-sized companies are the ones most likely looking to outsource IT operations to carriers.

The success of the alliance may well depend on execution, Passmore added. “We’ve seen a lot of this type of alliance, and they don’t all work,” he said. “This one seems real in the sense that HP has agreed to take over Alcatel IT operations and there are dedicated resources to the alliance, which is a pretty good sign of showing a commitment on the part of both parties.”

Under the agreement, which still must be finalized, HP and Alcatel-Lucent will jointly develop the technologies that help network service providers converge IT and telecom within their network infrastructure to enable more efficient delivery of the next generation of services, which will go beyond basic transport to managed IT offerings and more. HP and Alcatel-Lucent will offer similar converged network solutions to governments, public sector organizations and large to mid-sized enterprises. 

Alcatel-Lucent will be transferring about 1000 jobs to HP as part of the agreement.

The communications programs the duo will offer include Alcatel-Lucent products in IP telephony, unified communications, mobility, security and contact centers, all of which will be combined with HP’s IT solutions. Alcatel-Lucent and HP are promising to offer end-to-end service solutions that use the full range of network and customer premises gear that each offers.

The announcement comes amid some speculation that HP might even buy Alcatel-Lucent and follows a February announcement that HP had helped migrate the vendor’s Paris data center into a state-of-the-art facility.