HP To Offer Alcatel-Lucent Networking Gear To Help Power The Cloud

HP is to offer Alcatel-Lucent networking products to customers after the two companies elected to expand their existing relationship to better serve businesses and service providers wishing to take advantage of the cloud.

As part of the deal, announced at HP Discover in Barcelona, some of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP routing and optical networking technology will be added to HP’s existing routing and storage products to reduce the complexity and improve the agility of business infrastructure as IT and telecommunications increasingly converge.

The two firms have worked together since 2009 and say the expansion of this relationship will see them use each other’s technology in the future if it benefits customers.

HP Alcatel-Lucent partnership

“HP and Alcatel-Lucent’s expanded alliance demonstrates our deep joint commitment to help large organisations and service providers transform and disrupt their respective industries and markets,” explained Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, HP enterprise group.

“We do this by taking each other’s best-in-class flagship products from our respective IT and networking portfolios, to deliver a unique set of data centre and network solutions that reduce complexity, lower OPEX and boost agility to accelerate innovation of new products and services.

As part of the deal, HP and Alcatel-Lucent will combine their storage and networking technologies to provide mutual customers with better connectivity and disaster recovery services and HP will start offering Alcatel-Lucent’s carrier-grade routers to large organisations from the second quarter of 2015.

Alcatel says it has “comprehensively adopted” HP technologies and has recently joined HP’s Early Access Forum for HP Helion – the firm’s open source, distributed cloud computing platform based on Openstack – to help customers take advantage of open server, processer and OS standards.

“This expanded alliance with HP allows us to continue doing what we do best – building networks that help meet our customers’ objectives,” added Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent IP Routing and Transport. “Together, we will continue to innovate and offer large enterprises and service providers the industry’s most agile and flexible solutions with the right performance and economics for the cloud era.”

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