News

BT and Alcatel-Lucent Collaborate to Offer IP VPN Services to Business Customers in Ireland

July 30th 2012

At a glance:

  • Alcatel-Lucent's award-winning IP products are utilised by BT Ireland to offer highly competitive, world-class IP-VPN services
  • Alcatel-Lucent is now a supplier of both carrier-class Ethernet and IP VPN services to BT in Ireland
  • BT Ireland manages its IP connect solution using Alcatel-Lucent's Service Aware Manager in its Irish network
  • management centre.

BT Ireland has confirmed that it will use Alcatel-Lucent's successful IP portfolio (7750 Service Router and 5620 Service Aware Manager), to underpin it's recently launched IP Connect Ireland service as part of its extensive network infrastructure in Ireland.

The Alcatel-Lucent platform already delivers cost-effective and feature rich Ethernet for BT Ireland customers; now it will deliver IP services for BT's business customers. IP Connect Ireland will utilise the latest generation of Alcatel-Lucent's platform hardware and software to deliver business-critical features cost-effectively via a wide range of access methods.

Businesses utilise their Ethernet-based and MPLS-based WANs for a variety of business reasons. A number of the key applications used by customers across their WANs today include:

  • Mission critical business applications (primarily but not limited to ERP systems)
  • Site-to-site VoIP
  • Growing use of high-definition video conferencing / telepresence facilities and services
  • CCTV and related security related applications

Efficient, cost effective and highly functional networks are critical infrastructure platforms required by our customers to operate their businesses while ensuring that all of their business applications are performing at the levels required by the customer. BT continues its on-going investment programme in market leading network technologies to ensure that our customers can grow and develop their businesses at the pace and depth necessary to win and develop in their respective markets.

Colm McVeigh, Head of Marketing, Product & Strategy, BT Ireland said, 'Irish business and public sector organisations are facing very significant business challenges in a rapidly evolving world. Our research and our on-going work with our customers has clearly highlighted a fundamental customer need for advanced IP and Ethernet network services to help address these critical business challenges. Our BT IP Connect service, together with the BT Ethernet Connect portfolio, add intelligence and extensive capabilities to a customer's network ensuring optimum and cost efficient performance while enabling a business to streamline and accelerate their network.'

Lucy Dimes, CEO Alcatel-Lucent UK&I said, 'Our IP products offer BT Ireland a stable and scalable platform upon which to innovate new services and we look forward to working with them on further service enhancements in the future. It is further recognition of the industry leadership position our IP portfolio has gained over recent years'.