Alcatel Lucent planning to make India its global services headquarters

With an eye on the booming telecom market in the country, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel Lucent is planning to shift its global service centre headquarters to India, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of the Paris-based company said yesterday.

Verwaayen, who joined the company in late 2008, said at a press briefing in Delhi yesterday, ''India is one of the strategic markets of depth of talent, new capabilities and socio services to support 3G and 4G. Given all these factors, we have shortlisted India as the global services headquarters thereby making it a fourth pillar of strategy.

The other global hubs are at US, China and France. This will involve an investment of half a billion dollars and hiring substantial number of resources over the next three years.''

With telecom operators now outsourcing their network management to telecom equipment makers, Alcatel Lucent is rightly planning to shift its global service centre to India just like Nokia Siemens Networks did when it shifted its global service centre from Munich to India in 2008.

Alcatel Lucent currently manages the services of Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel and also has a joint venture with the Indian government R&D Telecom organisation CDOT for the development of broadband wireless access solutions like WiMAX.

It operates its R&D activities in India through Bell Labs Research Centre at Bangalore that has 100,000 square feet of lab space and employs 3,500 engineers and scientists. It also has software development centres at Gurgaon, Noida, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.