AlcaLu Hires Senior BT Exec

News Analysis Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief 1/4/2011

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) has poached senior BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) executive George Nazi to join its Quality Assurance and Customer Care management team in Paris.

In making the switch across the operator/vendor divide -- and across the English Channel -- Nazi rejoins his former BT CEO, Ben Verwaayen, who is now the head honcho at AlcaLu.

Nazi, who is currently president of BT's 21CN transformation program, will join AlcaLu on Feb. 15, reporting to Janet Davidson, one of the few ex-Lucent executives still in a senior position at the vendor. You can see Nazi here talking to Light Reading about the 21CN at the recent Broadband World Forum 2010 event in Paris.

Why this matters
This is a significant move for all parties. For AlcaLu it brings on board further carrier experience to help with the vendor's applications enablement program, which is focused on operators' Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) capabilities, and to provide more recent insight into the BT account, a significant one for the vendor.

And AlcaLu CEO Verwaayen knows what he's getting by hiring Nazi, who was one of his senior lieutenants at BT.

For BT, it means having to replace a senior executive who has been instrumental in the development of the 21CN strategy during the past few years, during which there have been a number of changes. As a result it's likely that Nazi will have a certain level of experience and knowledge about the program that BT might find hard to replicate.

For more
BT's 21CN program has evolved during the past few years, with a greater focus on next-generation broadband access and Carrier Ethernet than on voice switch replacement, while AlcaLu is undergoing a gradual transformation of its own under Verwaayen's leadership.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading

Interested in learning more on this topic? Then come to Subscriber-Centric 4G & Advanced Services: Using OSS/BSS to Drive Revenue in 2011, the first stop in our Service Provider IT Global Event Series. To be staged in London, Jan. 25, admission is free for attendees meeting our prequalification criteria. For more information, or to register, click here.