Reliance Communications and Alcatel Lucent

CORPORATE/TELECOM

by Prashant Kapadia/INS

Reliance Communcations and Alcatel Lucent enter long term billion dollar contract

Jan 16, 2013

Reliance Communications (RCOM), India’s fully integrated telecommunications service provider and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), have today announced a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end network managed services contract aimed at delivering superior customer experience in Eastern and Southern India up to 2020.

The contract which extends RCOM’s existing relationship with Alcatel-Lucent’s for over USD 1 billion, will deliver world-class, seamless voice and data communications services to RCOM customers.

This is India’s first fully integrated strategic agreement and one of just-a-few globally, to meet the fast evolving customer demand for communications applications and services in one of the world’s most dynamic telecom markets.

Alcatel-Lucent will enhance Reliance Communication’s operations, and synergize hitherto independent wireless and wireline teams to form a single network management organization. This optimized integration of resources

Munish Seth, President & Managing Director - Alcatel Lucent with Gurdeep Singh, CEO, Wireless Business - Reliance Communication signing the contract in Mumbai

will help Reliance Communications to strengthen its focus on growing its business, with top-of-the-line services to customers. Alcatel-Lucent also will drive a standardization of the tools, processes and best practices that are applied across RCOM’s businesses.

This strategic agreement will give Reliance Communications the unique capability to proactively assure a high quality and consistent experience for customers regardless of device or type of connection. To enable the new model, Alcatel-Lucent will set up and operate next-generation OSS (operations support systems) and introduce advanced real-time optimization tools to improve network performance across Reliance’s wireless, wireline, long-distance, fiber and utilities’ functions.  RCOM and Alcatel-Lucent will work together to create the pathway required by the emerging demands for data-driven and multiple device-led usage of communication solutions and applications by Indian telecom customers.

Commenting on the partnership, Gurdeep Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Wireless Business, Reliance Communications said: “We are happy to announce our new partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, which is a transformative leap from the limited scope and vision of traditional outsourcing of services. This will enable Reliance Communications to take the lead in offering next generation telecom solutions that will meet and exceed the expectations of our customers, and help them to transit from voice-led usage to a seamless data experience across multiple devices and platforms.”

Rajeev Singh-Molares, President, Asia-Pacific with Alcatel-Lucent said: “This business association is an extension of our long-standing relationship with Reliance Communications, and our commitment to India. It also demonstrates our renewed focus on managed services as we apply greater selectivity on more value-added contracts. The enormous scope of this agreement will bring a wide variety of skills, expertise and hands-on know-how that we can leverage for the benefit of others.”

Alcatel-Lucent will be responsible for improving network performance and ultimately consistent service quality, with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction and retention across all geographies as per the contract.

“This is first time that National Long Distance network and Access network (Enterprise) is being outsourced to deliver world-class service delivery and assurance performance. Our enterprise customers will be able to deploy state-of-the-art data services with high confidence underpinned by our integrated network and expertise of ALU” added Punit Garg, Chief Executive Officer, Global and Enterprise Business, Reliance Communications.

Munish Seth, President and Managing Director, Alcatel-Lucent India said: “Having partnered with Reliance Communications over the years, we fully understand what is required to manage and transform its network. We believe that our extensive experience with Reliance Communications has played a major part in the expansion of our existing relationship, and the awarding of what is one of the largest and most strategic contracts for us to date. This is a significant milestone for Alcatel-Lucent in India”.