Alcatel-Lucent SA (NYSE; Euronext: ALU) research unit Bell Labs will soon set up activities in Israel, the company's CEO Michel Combes told the MIXiii Israel Innovation Conference in Tel Aviv today. Prof. Danny Raz of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology will manage cloud and network research at the multinational's CloudBand unit in Kfar Saba.
CloudBand is developing technology that is at the heart of solutions that Alcatel-Lucent offers its customers to optimize their network operations. CloudBand is a strategic business at the company that is entirely run at the unit's premises in Israel by Alcatel-Lucent VP David Skoler.
The R&D office will initially have 20 employees, and the company will hire more later. Bell Labs has 750 employees, mostly in the US and France. "This is a unique opportunity for me as a scientist to be part of the redesigning the world of communications, and to influence the lives of people all over the world," said Raz. "The opportunity is as great as the challenge, because the Israeli team will have to produce innovative breakthrough technology that will be included in attempts to solve cloud and network challenges."
Bell Labs was founded in 1925 to carry out telecommunications research. Its research has underpinned inventions of transistors, lasers, C and UNIX programming languages, and solar panels. Alcatel-Lucent acquired the company as part of the merger of Alcatel and Lucent, which had previously acquired Bell Labs in 2007.