Alcatel-Lucent

By Laurent Le Gourrierec, Head of M&A Advisory Group, Alcatel-Lucent

Big day today with the launch of a new venture fund dedicated to telecoms!

Managed by Innovacom, one of the top five VCs in France, the Technocom 2 fund will provide over €30m in seed funding for new start-ups in France in areas including next generation networks, M2M, cloud, big data and other areas of interest to us.  Between 15-20 companies will be launched over the next 3-4 years from this fund.

We are investing alongside Orange, Group SEB and Soitec with a hefty chunk of government funding from CDC Entreprises.  The launch of this fund represents another powerful example of co-creation for Alcatel-Lucent with our close customers and other industrial partners.  Increasingly, companies are realizing that there is need to address and manage innovation originating outside of their traditional R&D structures.  Venture funds, incubators, joint collaborations are becoming the norm in the IT and telco industries with announcements almost every day.  AT&T has the Foundry initiative that we are also involved in, Orange recently launched another €300m late stage investment fund alongside Publicis for applications and web commerce, Saudi Telecom have just launched a €100m fund (also in France), Vodafone, DT, Qualcomm & Google all have their own active corporate funds etc.

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Technology Review Mar/Apr 2012 issue

By Simon Poulter, Corporate Public Relations, Alcatel-Lucent

There is an in-joke amongst people working in technology public relations that a product breakthrough should never be described in a press release as “revolutionary” on the grounds that it means, simply, that “it goes around and around”. Taking this into account, digitization has, over more than two decades, meant that advances in information, communications and consumer electronics technologies have been more about evolution than revolution. That’s not to take anything away from their impact: it’s more of a reflection of the continual search for improvement, and the incremental nature of delivering it.

However, it does mean that when a genuine blockbuster breakthrough does occur, the impact is seismic.

Last year, Alcatel-Lucent made such a breakthrough with lightRadio™: engineers at Bell Labs successfully found a way of miniaturizing the hardware elements of a traditional mobile phone base station into a small cube-shaped device while finding a means to distribute the ‘intelligence’ of mobile communications throughout a network, rather than sat in single, large hubs.

The beauty of this breakthrough was threefold: small, lightRadio-based base stations could be sited almost anywhere – hidden in bus shelters, attached to lampposts, on the side of buildings – providing a welcome alternative to the communications towers that often blight an urban or rural landscape; secondly, as mobile telephony rapidly changes from voice to data-based communications, lightRadio’s unique architecture allows for mixed-use application – for example, in a city center handling a mixture of 4G, 3G, 2G and WiFi data, Internet traffic and voice calls; and thirdly, the cube’s small footprint and low power consumption enables network operators to lower their energy costs at a time of increasing fuel bills…as well as increasing concerns about the environmental impact of their operations.

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By Houman Modarres, Director of Product Marketing, Networks Group

I can’t even count the times in my career when I have talked about what a high-speed, high-bandwidth network makes possible. Of course over time ‘what is possible’ has changed dramatically as the network has become exponentially faster, bigger and more powerful.

Last week at the SC11 conference in Seattle, Alcatel-Lucent and LGS Innovations (our US government arm) contributed to a network that brought 450 Gigabits per second of capacity into the Washington State Convention Center. The SCinet network is created each year to support breakthrough high performance computing demonstrations – and it is one of the best venues to see the true power of broadband and the innovation that ultra high-speed connectivity can enable.

We took part in many SCinet demonstrations leveraging our 7750 Service Router (SR) in support of our relationship with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). They are building a nationwide 100 Gigabit per second Ethernet (100GE) network that will accommodate the tenfold increase in science data traffic volume expected over the next four years. The first phase of this network connects three of the DOE Office of Science’s leading supercomputing facilities.

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By Lindsay Newell, VP Product and Solution Marketing, Networks Group

Bill Zucker (far right) receiving the Leading Lights awards with Ray Le Maistre and Phil Harvey, Light Reading - Photo by Matt Carr/Getty Images for Light Reading

Last week in New York – the city that never sleeps – Alcatel-Lucent collected top honors in two categories of the Light Reading Leading Lights awards – Best New Product in the Telecom category for our FP3 400G IP Network Processor and Best New Product in the Mobile category for lightRadio^TM (see the winners list here).

It’s fitting that an IP innovation and a wireless innovation shared the spotlight as those two technologies are a key combination to bring broadband content and applications to millions of mobile consumers and business users every hour of every day – from the city that never sleeps to the most remote corners of the world.

If I look back on 2011, it has been a banner year at Alcatel-Lucent for pushing the boundaries of networking and communication with technology and innovation – from 100Gigabit coherent optics to the 400Gigabit FP3 and from 100MB over VDSL copper broadband access to wireless lightRadio^TM.  A relentless focus on innovation is truly helping our customers and their customers to realize the potential of a connected world.

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Tod Sizer (center) with Jim Meigs, Editor in Chief of Popular Mechanics (left) and Bill Congdon, Publisher of Popular Mechanics (right)

By Tod Sizer, Bell Labs Wireless research leader.

Last week my team and I received one of the 2011 Breakthrough Innovation awards from Popular Mechanics magazine for the innovation of the lightRadio™ cube.  The presentation was preceded by an afternoon of panel sessions where we had the honor of meeting the other winners this year, many of whom had the opportunity to tell of their innovations.  What struck me, however, was a common thread that ran through all of our stories.

First there was a high school group that were honored for making the semi-finals in a competition to make a super efficient car against over one hundred other entries, universities and for profit groups, but no other high schools, designing a vehicle that demonstrated 160 mpg over a 100mile course.  This team was from West Philadelphia, one of the roughest areas of the United States, where fewer than half of the kids graduate from high school.  Nobody thought that this auto shop class after school project could compete. But they did, making it into the top quarter of the competitors.

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