Alcatel-Lucent: Unified Communications Meets Cloud Services?

Alcatel-Lucent is aiming for the cloud service provider market with the launch of CloudBand, a business-class platform designed to turn data center infrastructure into a secure, high-performance cloud delivery mechanis .

You can tell that this is Alcatel-Lucent’s first step into a wider market because the press release is full of long expository paragraphs explaining the benefits of getting into the cloud if you’re a service provider: It speeds up time-to-market, grants the kind of elasticity needed to scale services up and down, and so on.

But Alcatel-Lucent says that its CloudBand technology is different, insofar as it’s truly optimized for the enterprise, with lower latency, higher quality of service, and better control of bandwidth. Moreover, Alcatel-Lucent says that they’ll provide unified communications (UC) offerings that slot right into the larger CloudBand ecosystem, so that cloud service providers can reach their customers with, say, video and SMS products with just a few clicks.

The CloudBand line consists of two parts: the CloudBand Management System, which actually orchestrates and optimizes your cloud’s connection with Alactel-Lucent’s service offerings, and CloudBand Node, which is the hardware and software platform for actually delivering the services from your data center.

The official rollout of CloudBand into the market won’t be until early 2012. But Hewlett-Packard has signed on to deliver Alcatel-Lucent UC services from its data center. Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent has its own public cloud-delivered services with a claimed 18 million subscribers.

We’ll be watching Alcatel-Lucent closely as CloudBand preps for its debutante ball, so keep watching.