HP agrees deal with Alcatel-Lucent

HP has signed a 10-year contract with Alcatel-Lucent to offer businesses unified communications and collaboration systems.

Alcatel-Lucent's IP telephony technology will be sold by HP as part of its enterprise portfolio, while customers using older PBX systems will be offered migration services.

Tom Burns, enterprise chief of Alcatel-Lucent, said: "We have a common approach to solutions that meet the needs of each individual customer's requirements, including their existing technology mix, overall organisational needs and migration plans for the future."

Alcatel-Lucent's VoIP architecture will be used by the partners to provide migration from multi-vendor and legacy PBX systems to IP voice systems. HP will focus on markets such as healthcare, financial services, utilities and government using Alcatel-Lucent's Advanced Communication Server. It will also offer customers Alcatel-Lucent's OmniPCX Enterprise messaging and telephony suite, as well as its own unified communications products and Genesys Customer Interaction management platform.

Cisco ended its partnership with HP in unified communications in February, citing "different and conflicting visions". HP has since formed an alliance with Polycom to deliver Polycom's video and voice unified communications as part of its services line-up.

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