Michel Combes to step down as ALU's CEO

Michel Combes will step down as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, effective September 1, as the company prepares for its merger with Nokia Networks.

For the duration of the transition period, Philippe Camus, currently Chairman of the Board of Directors, will become Chairman and Interim CEO. Jean-Cyril Spinetta is appointed Lead Director of the Board. Philippe Guillemot, Chief Operating Officer, will be in charge of leading the operational management of the group. Jean Raby, Chief Finance and Legal Officer, will be responsible for completing the proposed transaction with Nokia. Philippe Guillemot and Basil Alwan, President of the IP Routing & Transport business line, will jointly lead the integration team.

Commenting on the Board’s decision, Philippe Camus said: “In order to achieve the objectives of this transition period and ensure the successful integration with Nokia, I will be supported for operational responsibilities by Philippe Guillemot who, in addition to leading execution of The Shift Plan, will also be in charge of the Executive Committee and will co-lead the integration process with Basil Alwan. Jean Raby will ensure the closure of the intended transaction in the best interests of the Alcatel-Lucent shareholders.”

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

• In February 2013, Alcatel-Lucent’s Board of Directors named Michel Combes as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.  Previously, Michel Combes was CEO of Vodafone Europe and a Board member of Vodafone PLC. During his career, he has held the positions of Chairman and CEO of TDF as well as Chief Financial Officer and Senior Executive Vice President of France Telecom.

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Alcatel-Lucent Reports Free Cash Flow in Q2 -- a first since 2006

Despite an overall soft spending environment,  notably in North America, Alcatel-Lucent reported revenue of EUR 3.450 billion for Q2 2015, excluding Managed Services and at constant perimeter, an increase of 6% year-on year. At constant exchange rates, Group revenues, excluding Managed Services and at constant perimeter, were down 8%.

The weight of next-generation activities continued to progress, representing 76% of revenues compared to 70% in the year-ago quarter. Next-generation technologies revenues increased 15% year-over-year at actual rates and declined 1% at constant exchange rates. Gross margin reached 34.8% of revenues, expanding 220 bps year-on-year, driven notably by improved profitability and favorable software mix across several business lines.

Commenting on the results, Michel Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “Our second quarter 2015 results represent a significant milestone for Alcatel-Lucent, reflecting the first Q2 of free cash flow generation since the merger of Alcatel and Lucent in 2006. Alcatel-Lucent’s financial results for the first half of 2015 clearly show that the company has delivered on the key objectives of The Shift Plan, launched two years ago. The company is now well on track to complete its turnaround by the end of the year.

Core Networking

• Core Networking segment revenues were Euro 1,675 million in Q2 2015, up 22% year-over-year at actual rates and up 10% at constant rates. 
• IP Routing revenues were Euro 659 million in Q2 2015, an increase of 17% at actual rates and 3% at constant rates, when compared to Q2 2014. The business witnessed double-digit growth in EMEA and CALA, resilience in North America and declines in APAC driven by a continued spending pause in Japan. Revenues from non-telco customers grew at a double-digit pace year-over-year, at constant exchange rates.
• 7950 XRS IP Core router saw strong year-over-year revenue growth and registered 5 new wins in Q2, for a total of 44 wins to date.
• Continued momentum in virtualized routing both in and outside the telecom service provider space with 8 new customers for the Virtualized Service Router (VSR) in Q2 2015, bringing the total to 16 deployments and over 75 trials underway, including our NFV trial with Telefonica which includes our VSR.
• Nuage added 5 new customers, bringing the total to 25 wins, including China Mobile, and announced collaborations with both Arista and Mirantis as part of Nuage Networks ecosystem program. Nuage also introduced the Virtualized Services Assurance Platform (VSAP), which addresses the need for visibility and correlation between the virtual networks for applications and workloads and the physical connectivity provided by the datacenter network infrastructure.
• IP Transport revenues were Euro 630 million in Q2 2015, up 30% at actual rates and 21% at constant rates, compared to the year-ago quarter. Terrestrial optics revenues showed strong double-digit growth at constant rates, as WDM witnessed strength in EMEA, CALA and APAC. 

ACCESS

• Access segment revenues were Euro 1,772 million in Q2 2015, a decrease of 7% year-over-year at actual rates and a decrease of 20% at constant rates. In Q2 2015, segment operating income was Euro 23 million, compared to a segment operating income of Euro 11 million in Q2 2014, reflecting improvements from both Wireless and Managed Services, in addition to continued double-digit margin contribution from Fixed Access.
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• Wireless Access revenues were Euro 1,148 million, a year-on-year decrease of 12% at actual rates and 27% at constant rates. Marked by a difficult comparison base in the year-ago quarter, the sales decline was driven by lower spending in the US and project timing in China. 

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com/press/2015/alcatel-lucent-reports-q2-2015-results

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Oracle Releases New OSS suite for NFV

Oracle Communications released a new version of its operational support system (OSS) suite to help communications service providers (CSPs) design services spanning physical and virtual networks. The suite is also designed to help streamline the operational delivery of customer orders—including high-growth B2B and wholesale orders—enabling CSPs to capitalize on the opportunities of a network function virtualization (NFV)-driven communications world.

The new version of the Oracle Communications OSS suite includes updates to several products, including Oracle Communications Design Studio, Oracle Communications Order and Service Management, Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management, Oracle Communications ASAP, Oracle Communications IP Service Activator, Oracle Communications Network Integrity, and Oracle Communications Network Intelligence. It is integrated and optimized to work with the Oracle Cloud Platform, Oracle Database 12c, and Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, improving performance, manageability, and security and enabling future OSS suite deployments in the cloud as well as on premises.

Key capabilities of the new OSS suite:

• Efficiently deliver and manage contemporary network-based B2B services: the upgraded OSS suite enhances the visual modeling, design, and configuration of packet-based network connectivity, including built-in support for MEF’s Carrier Ethernet 2.0 services such as E-Line and E-LAN, and the ability to efficiently process large B2B or wholesale orders up to 6,000 line items per order. The suite also supports agile orchestration and delivery of Carrier Ethernet 2.0 services across multiple network operators, aligning with the MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration architecture recently demonstrated at TM Forum Live.
  
• Seamlessly support the design and delivery of services on physical, virtual, and hybrid networks: Oracle Communications provides CSPs with a single, integrated, end-to-end design environment spanning business, operations, and network processes that, in conjunction with Oracle Communications Network Service Orchestration Solution, extends the OSS suite to deliver services on virtual and hybrid networks. This helps to ensure that CSPs avoid cumbersome or fragmented design approaches and can achieve not just network agility, but actual business agility.
• Accelerate solution design in collaboration with existing provisioning systems: With a new catalog export capability, CSPs can holistically design their fulfillment solution once and then propagate the design to any number of participating systems, from enterprise catalogs to specialized provisioning systems. This end-to-end design approach enables faster and more efficient solution design by reducing manual steps in the process.
• Efficiently manage exceptions in order processing: The upgraded OSS suite includes new tools to more effectively process complex orders and manage exceptions during order processing, including enhancements to order jeopardy and fallout management and batch order changes. These new tools can help CSPs diagnose and resolve issues faster without requiring custom modeling or specialist skills, in turn reducing operational costs and improving the customer experience.

“As CSPs continue to standardize and virtualize their networks, agility in service design and automation in service delivery have become major focus areas—which is putting a spotlight on OSS to rapidly launch and efficiently deliver innovative services on an increasingly dynamic network,” said Doug Suriano, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications. “This release of the Oracle Communications OSS suite accelerates design agility, provides support for the latest network technologies, and further simplifies network-based B2B service delivery in practice, supporting our commitment to delivering innovative OSS solutions in an increasingly virtualized communications world.”

http://www.oracle.com

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IBM Launches IoT Developer Program

IBM announced the launch of a new community to help developers connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud and how to use data coming from those connected devices.

The IBM developerWorks Recipes community, which leverages IBM's platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, will provide step-by-step tutorials for embedding advanced analytics and machine learning into IoT devices and applications. Examples include:

• Understanding vehicle performance by analyzing data from its On-Board Diagnostic system.
• Linking real-time machine condition monitoring with IBM asset management to monitor everything from the health of household appliances to wheels on a railroad car.
• Spotting trends and obtaining solutions to common problems through graphical representation of historical and real-time data from IoT devices.

“For years, companies have been building their machine-to-machine and IoT applications essentially from scratch. IBM developerWorks Recipes enables companies to leverage the hard lessons learned by other developers in order to simplify the process – a goal to which MultiTech has been committed for more than 40 years,” said Daniel Quant, Vice President of Product Management, MultiTech Systems. “IBM is helping to enable us and our customers to connect devices quickly and with security features to the IBM Cloud – with the ultimate goal of transforming our business processes and efficiencies.”


http://www.ibm.com

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Facebook Now Has 968 Million Daily Users

Facebook users are spending an average 46 minutes per day on the site (not including WhatsApp). More than 700 million users are using Messenger.

Second Quarter 2015 Operational Highlights

• Daily active users (DAUs) - DAUs were 968 million on average for June 2015, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
• Mobile DAUs - Mobile DAUs were 844 million on average for June 2015, an increase of 29% year-over-year.
• Monthly active users (MAUs) - MAUs were 1.49 billion as of June 30, 2015, an increase of 13% year-over-year.
• Mobile MAUs - Mobile MAUs were 1.31 billion as of June 30, 2015, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
• Instagram MAUs - Instagram MAUs were 300 million in June
• Messenger MAUs - Messenger MAUs were 700 million in June
• WhatsApp MAUs - WhatsApp MAUs were 800 million in June

Capital expenditures - Capital expenditures for the second quarter of 2015 were $549 million.

On a conference call, Facebook executives said 2015 is a year of strategic building with CAPEX guidance in the $2.5 - $3.0 billion range, up from $1.8 billion in 2014, including investments in data centers, servers, and networks.

http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562

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Quintillion Picks Alcatel-Lucent for Undersea Cable in Alaska

Quintillion Subsea Holdings awarded a turnkey contract to Alcatel-Lucent for the design and construction of a submarine cable system in Alaska from Prudhoe Bay to Nome.

The system will offer a unique route to bring reliable, affordable high-speed broadband access to the North Slope of Alaska and will bridge the digital divide in an area of Alaska where bandwidth is currently still limited.

It will offer a capacity of at least 10 terabits-per-second per fiber pair. The system will consist of three fiber pairs capable of carrying 100 wavelengths, each of which can support 100 Gbps of data capacity. Phase 1 will be a 1,850 km segment linking the Alaskan communities of Nome, Kotzebue, Wainwright, Point Hope, Barrow, and Prudhoe Bay and will provide for future extensions to Asia and Europe.  Scheduled for completion by the end of 2016, Phase 1 will incorporate advanced routing and burial techniques to protect the cable and enhance the integrity of the system.

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com/press/2015/alcatel-lucent-and-quintillion-subsea-holdings-build-undersea-cable-system-connecting-six

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U.S. Launches National Strategic Computing Initiative

President Obama issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which aims to bolster the development and deployment of high-performance computing (HPS) systems.

The initiative represents a "coordinated research, development, and deployment strategy will draw on the strengths of departments and agencies to move the Federal government into a position that sharpens, develops, and streamlines a wide range of new 21st century applications. It is designed to advance core technologies to solve difficult computational problems and foster increased use of the new capabilities in the public and private sectors.

The National Strategic Computing Initiative has five strategic themes.

• Create systems that can apply exaflops of computing power to exabytes of data.
• Keep the United States at the forefront of HPC capabilities.
• Improve HPC application developer productivity.
• Make HPC readily available.
• Establish hardware technology for future HPC systems. 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/nsci_fact_sheet.pdf

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