Alcatel-Lucent Opens Cloud R&D Facility in IsraelAlcatel-Lucent Opens Cloud R&D Facility in Israel

KFAR SABA, Israel -- 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.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU)