HP to sell Alcatel-Lucent's unified comms systems

HP and Alcatel-Lucent have signed a 10-year agreement that will see the companies jointly offer unified communications and collaboration systems to businesses.

The alliance, announced on Monday, will involve HP selling Alcatel-Lucent's IP telephony technology as part of its enterprise portfolio, along with migration services for customers using older PBX systems.

"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 enterprise chief Tom Burns said in a statement.

The partners will offer migration from multi-vendor and legacy PBX systems to an IP voice systems, using Alcatel-Lucent's VoIP architecture. HP will target vertical markets such as healthcare, financial services, utilities and government using Alcatel-Lucent's Advanced Communication Server.

HP will also offer its customers Alcatel-Lucent's OmniPCX Enterprise messaging and IP telephony suite, alongside its own unified communications products and Genesys Customer Interaction management platform.

The deal between HP and Alcatel-Lucent was trailed in a relationship agreement unveiled in June 2009. In February this year, Cisco broke off its longstanding partnership with HP in unified communications, saying that the companies had "different and conflicting visions". Since then, HP has struck an alliance with Polycom to deliver Polycom's video and voice unified communications as part of its services lineup.