Alcatel-Lucent announces agreement to acquire NetDevices

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held NetDevices, a developer of services gateway products for enterprise branch networks, based in Sunnyvale, California. NetDevices delivers a market recognized, innovative and flexible enterprise networking platform known as a Unified Service Gateway which is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of managing branch office networks. NetDevices was founded in 2003 and has 45 employees located in Sunnyvale and Bangalore, India.

“Today’s enterprises are looking for ways to transform their businesses through the deployment of networks and services that enable their employees to work more efficiently, and their customers to receive a higher level of satisfaction,” said Hubert de Pesquidoux, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise activities. "Enterprises are quickly evolving to a converged communications infrastructure of data, voice, and security services running with high reliability and serviceability. Traditional architectures lack the flexibility and programmability to deploy these new converged infrastructures in a cost-effective way. A fresh approach based on the innovative enterprise platform from NetDevices combined with our core strengths of voice and switching helps to deliver best in class enterprise networks.”

“NetDevices’ services gateways bring all required services for a branch office in a unified package, dramatically reducing the network complexity for enterprise customers and small medium business. I am very excited that by joining forces with Alcatel-Lucent, we can enhance the benefits of NetDevices’ solutions to our customers and create new opportunities for our partners,” said Seenu Banda, founder and CEO of NetDevices. "Alcatel-Lucent provides an ideal partnership with its global sales, service, and the development capabilities. With this agreement, NetDevices joins Alcatel-Lucent to complement its end to end solutions, and to pursue our goal of delivering innovative products to a large set of customers worldwide.”

Upon close of the transaction, the NetDevices team and products will be integrated into Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Business Group, reporting into Tom Burns, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Solutions activities.

The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the second quarter of Alcatel-Lucent’s fiscal year 2007. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.