Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes outlines The Shift Plan strategy to accelerate telecommunications to the cloud

-- Formal opening of world-class cloud research and development center in Israel to deliver on the promise of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)

KFAR SABA, Israel, Oct. 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) CEO Michel Combes will outline how The Shift Plan – the company's industrial transformation from telecoms generalist to specialist in IP Networking and Ultra-Broadband Access – will leverage new technologies to accelerate the move to the cloud by service providers.

Speaking at the opening of Alcatel-Lucent's world-class cloud research and development center near Tel Aviv, Mr. Combes will explain the role cloud is playing in IP Networking and Ultra-Broadband Access. He will talk about how these technologies will enable the high performance networks of tomorrow, supporting service providers, webscale companies and large enterprises, to meet consumer and business demands.  

In particular, Mr. Combes will talk about how Alcatel-Lucent is leveraging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology, and how it will help service providers meet the always-connected demands of their customers. NFV enables network services to be deployed on a shared cloud infrastructure instead of dedicated, purpose-built hardware.

"We believe new technologies like NFV and Software Defined Networking are going to massively change the networking landscape," Mr. Combes will say. "They will lead the industry's network transformation to a cloud-based approach."

Alcatel-Lucent's cloud facility in Kfar Saba in Israel is working to help customers apply NFV to create a simpler, more agile and efficient operating model for meeting networking demands.

"Having world-class cloud facilities in Israel, as well as in Silicon Valley, gives Alcatel-Lucent two of the brightest centers in the world focused on excellence in cloud technologies," Mr. Combes will comment. "Their location, in global innovation hubs, underscores our commitment to cloud's evolution, which we see as one of the most integral and influential technologies shaping next generation networks, communications, business and the economy within the next five years."

To meet the unique requirements of operating telecoms networks within a cloud infrastructure, Alcatel-Lucent's cloud facility in Israel operates in close collaboration with the company's Bell Labs innovation arm and is an incubation center for NFV activities and customer projects.

At the center of this work is Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand™ solution --  the industry's first open, multivendor NFV management platform enabling service providers to bring the benefits of the cloud to their own networks and business operations while offering cloud services with the security, reliability and quality enterprises and consumers expect from telecommunications networks.

In addition, Alcatel-Lucent is moving major parts of its portfolio to the cloud. By doing this heavy lifting, Alcatel-Lucent is both creating a path to NFV technology and giving service providers choices on which key network services to deploy to the cloud.

The facility at Kfar Saba also has a collaborative relationship with major Israeli universities, specifically Tel-Aviv University and Technion, to research distributed cloud optimization. Furthermore, Alcatel-Lucent will be investing further in cloud development at Kfar Saba as part of its global investment in cloud which is an integral part of the technology focus within The Shift Plan.

About Alcatel-Lucent & Cloud

• Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand solution is an open NFV platform for the distribution, automation and life-cycle management of cloud services. The CloudBand Management System orchestrates and optimizes services between the communications network and the cloud, while the CloudBand Node provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services.
• Alcatel-Lucent announced the first open NFV ecosystem program of its kind to bring service providers, developers and vendors together to accelerate the speed in which global operators can virtualize portions of their networks. It's making its CloudBand solution available to developers and vendors to test and validate applications and services within a simulated service provider cloud environment.
• Alcatel-Lucent announced a breakthrough Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution in April of this year. Offered by the company's new Nuage Networks venture, it makes datacenter networks as dynamic and responsive as applications and users need them to be. The Nuage solution is also at the heart of bringing automation and instantaneous network establishment to the CloudBand NFV solution. In striving to remove all of the networking restrictions that hold back the promise of rapid cloud-based application delivery, the Nuage Networks SDN offering leverages the proven service router networking technology of Alcatel-Lucent's highly successful IP business division, whose equipment is deployed by more than 500 service providers in 110 countries worldwide.

About Alcatel-Lucent in Israel

Alcatel-Lucent is a leading telecom infrastructure provider to Israel and the Palestine Authority with deployments of IP, optical transmission and small cells. Also a worldwide leader of 4G LTE deployments and access technologies, including FTTH, Alcatel-Lucent is leading in the Israeli service provider migration to LTE beginning next year, as well as the country's transformation to a new, fast broadband reality.

About Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU)

Alcatel-Lucent is at the forefront of global communications, providing products and innovations in IP and cloud networking, as well as ultra-broadband fixed and wireless access to service providers and their customers, enterprises and institutions throughout the world.

Underpinning Alcatel-Lucent in driving the industrial transformation from voice telephony to high-speed digital delivery of data, video and information is Bell Labs, an integral part of Alcatel-Lucent and one of the world's foremost technology research institutes, responsible for countless breakthroughs that have shaped the networking and communications industry. Alcatel-Lucent innovations have resulted in the company being recognized by Thomson Reuters as a Top 100 Global Innovator, as well as being named by MIT Technology Review as amongst 2012's Top 50 "World's Most Innovative Companies". Alcatel-Lucent has also been recognized for innovation in sustainability, being named Industry Group Leader for Technology Hardware & Equipment sector in the 2013 Dow Jones Sustainability Indices review for making global communications more sustainable, affordable and accessible, all in pursuit of the company's mission to realize the potential of a connected world.

With revenues of Euro 14.4 billion in 2012, Alcatel-Lucent is listed on the Paris and New York stock exchanges (Euronext and NYSE: ALU). The company is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris.

For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow the Company on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.