Alcatel-Lucent opens IP center in Asia-Pacific

Seeing how the delivery of IP-based solutions has become a major focus of carriers around the world, Alcatel-Lucent opened this month its third global IP Transformation Center (IPTC) designed to help its customers bridge the technology gap between their legacy systems and new Internet Protocol technologies in a more cost-effective way.

The new IPTC in Singapore will complement similar facilities that were earlier put up in Texas and Belgium.

Pierre-Alain Cadillon, Alcatel-Lucent’s senior vice president and head of the regional unit in Southeast Asia, said the new IPTC will mainly service clients in the Asia-Pacific region that are looking at deploying new IP services.

"We can build, design, operate and if necessary, manage any end-to-end solutions or to integrate any (legacy) equipment with newer ones. Our IPTCs can even provide market analysis so our clients can make the right business and/or technology decisions. The IPTC offers combined solution integration and project management expertise," Cadillon said.

As the name suggests, an IPTC is where a carrier can transform its old systems and simulate new environments in an IP setting. An example could be IPTV which is a new and complex solution that many carriers are interested in trying out.

The IPTC can handle multi-technology, multi-vendor, end-to-end solutions and offers an integration laboratory where carriers may do or test a new network setup.

The center also offers business consulting, network solution design, system integration, and project program third party management, among others.

"We are integrating at least 50 different technologies in the IPTC from optics to data to access, fiber to DSL, IPTV, mobile TV, to name a few, and we do this across different layers. Moving to IP environments would entail huge investments if carriers do them outright on their own… The IPTC helps them make sure they could test and configure their systems first to see what’s applicable or not so the system will work on Day 1," said Madhusudan Pandya, Alcatel-Lucent’s regional head for customer solutions.

The opening of an IPTC in Singapore is also logistically advantageous to Alcatel-Lucent’s customers in the region as they can now frequently send their own people to the center, said Klass Oreel, managing director and country senior officer for Alcatel-Lucent in the Philippines.

Alcatel-Lucent’s IPTCs are aligned with the research and development efforts of the new company which claims to have spent 2.7 billion euros on R&D last year or 14 percent of its pro-forma revenues of 18.3 billion euros.

Following its successful merger that was completed in December 2006, the new company now claims to have one of the world’s largest global R&D capabilities in communications, leveraging the strengths of Bell Labs and Research and Innovation.

To date, Alcatel-Lucent has 25 major innovation centers worldwide manned by 25,000 R&D engineers and scientists, and boasts over 25,000 active patents and six Nobel Prizes.