Our agreement with HP goes beyond outsourcing he said

The leadership change, but restructuring continue in Alcatel-Lucent. Telecom equipment manufacturer announced yesterday that he would give "a share" of the management of computer operations to us giant Hewlett-Packard wide Alliance imposed for a period of ten years.

A key, a thousand jobs (1.022 precisely, including 205 in France) will be transferred from Alcatel-Lucent to HP by the end of the year, according to the unions. The French manufacturer has not detailed the financial terms of the agreement but hope to achieve "of significant overall savings and improved its cash." "This will contribute to achieving our financial goals this year, and especially next year," said the Director General, Ben Verwaayen, in an interview to "echoes". The manufacturer is 750 million euros in savings this year. Morgan Stanley believes that the transfer of employees will allow Alcatel savings of the order of EUR 50 million per year. This outsourcing plan concerned trade unions at the time when HP provides also deletions of jobs (see below): "this is to outsource social plans, fears Odile Denis, the European Group Committee CFDT Secretary. In the past, Alcatel has sold factories to subcontractors, who then closed. "The fear is so great that other outsourcing projects are in preparation. The direction of Alcatel announced thus elected representatives willingness to outsource the maintenance of its more mature switches, on which work nearly 600 employees today, including 59 site of Lannion (Côtes-). Discussions are ongoing with the Indians HCL Infosystems, Wipro and Infosys. In addition to this "R & D", Alcatel leads discussions to outsource certain administrative functions (human resources and finance). "We are conducting intense discussions and hopefully lead to agreements in the coming months," confirms Ben Verwaayen.

Commercial ambitions

But rather to outsourcing, the Director-General prefers to speak of co-investments. "Our agreement with HP goes beyond outsourcing," he said. The alliance has indeed a commercial aspect: the two groups will offer their customers common telecoms and computing. "The convergence of these two worlds is running, justifies Ben Verwaayen. All networks are migrating to the Internet Protocol and our customers no longer want to manage a computer network on the one hand and the other telecoms network. In view of this, we had two options: either attack only the computer market, or decide to combine with a giant to offer the best products of each. "Fort of this alliance, the Director General promised"several billion euros of additional income over the next 10 years"for HP and Alcatel.

Before elected officials, the direction of Alcatel would even estimated that 10 of the turnover of the group could ultimately be generated by this partnership. "Convergence télécoms-Informatics developed next time but is real, said Juliette Audoin, Director of the cabinet of Pierre Audoin Consultants Council.". It was pushed by the operators and manufacturers Telecom, who saw the opportunity to rise in the value chain by offering new services. Remains that alliances between two global giants such as HP and Alcatel are usually complicated to manage and take time to be put in place. "Now, Alcatel-Lucent hope though HP advertising the merits of its equipment rather than those of Cisco...