Alcatel-Lucent Picks Up Two More Network Outsourcings

Still under siege but with its new CEO at the helm, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) seems to be picking up some momentum in the managed services segment. Last month it was a $1B deal for about half of Reliance Communications network management needs in India. And this week we have two more, although perhaps not quite of that magnitude.

In the Netherlands, the Franco-American giant announced a 5 year deal with the Dutch incumbent KPN to manage its fixed-line network. Alcatel-Lucent will both be managing the day-to-day operations and the migration of of the existing platform onto their own nextgen technology.

And back in India, Norway’s Telenor has appointed Alcatel-Lucent to manage the wireless network for its Telewings Communications subsidiary there. Telewings turf includes some 257M people across the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. The extra scale that comes with managing more than one network in the same region seems like it would be important to making this kind of outsourcing really help the industry’s cost structure as a whole.

Neither case mentioned a migration of personnel from outsourcer to oursourcee this time, but there’s probably some of it buried in there somehow. Both Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson have been working hard on expanding their managed services businesses worldwide lately.  I still find the whole concept of a telecommunications company outsourcing its network operations as non-core to be somewhat mind-boggling, but it does seem to be gaining traction.

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