The French telecoms equipment vendor has cleared all but one of the obstacles to its acquisition of its US competitor, the one outstanding being the all clear from Washington on the antitrust front. The deal will create a $25bn company and, after 8,000 lay-offs, an organization with 72,000 staff around the globe.
In terms of markets, it will have a significant presence in fixed-line carrier networking, both the GSM and CDMA camps in mobile, WiFi and WiMAX on the wireless side. And it will have 24% share of the optical market, with an enterprise networking business that contributes 10%-15% of its top line, with PBXs, a collaboration suite and an Ethernet switching portfolio.
Its revenues will roughly equal those of Cisco Systems Inc, with the difference that the latter is more heavily in enterprise while Alcatel Lucent will be primarily a carrier player.
One relationship Alcatel inherits with the acquisition, meanwhile, will be Lucent’s system integration status on Juniper Networks Inc’s carrier routing platforms. This has been a significant business for Lucent in its endeavour to develop its services business, and indeed was the sole reason it appeared on the supplier list for BT Group Plc’s 21st Century Network (21CN), a $20bn next-generation network (NGN) project for which the eight suppliers were announced last year.
It is only natural, therefore, that Alcatel should want to allay customers’ fears of a change in policy as a result of the acquisition of Lucent.
We’ll continue to support customers with existing contracts, said Michel Rahier, president of the Paris-based company’s fixed communications group.
However, for new customers, it’s very likely we’ll offer them IP service routers from Alcatel, Rahier said, referring to the TiMetra portfolio the Paris-based company acquired back in 2003. And for those carriers with Juniper boxes deployed and serviced by Lucent today, maybe over time we can convince them to switch to Alcatel, he said.
