PR Archives:  LatestBy Company By Date


Press Release -- November 4th, 2013
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
Tags:

Marcus Weldon appointed President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs to accelerate and unlock innovation as part of The Shift Plan

New role to be combined with current position of Chief Technology Officer at Alcatel-Lucent

Paris, November 4, 2013 – Alcatel-Lucent has today announced the appointment of Dr. Marcus Weldon as President of Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and the world’s leading industrial communications research organization. Dr. Weldon will combine this role with his existing role as Alcatel-Lucent’s Corporate CTO.

Commenting on Dr. Weldon’s appointment, Michel Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “Innovation is a key pillar of The Shift Plan, our industrial program to reposition the company as a specialist in IP Networking and Ultra-Broadband Access. In his new, combined role as Bell Labs president and Chief Technology Officer, Marcus will oversee the acceleration and unlocking of innovation in the company. In this role, he will strengthen cooperation with third parties and speed up the pace of R&D to ensure Alcatel-Lucent can respond to its customers’ challenges with agility.”

Marcus Weldon is regarded as a industry luminary with a strong track record of identifying opportunities for technological disruption, with recent breakthroughs including the application of vectoring in fixed access, championing the use of LTE overlay and small cells in wireless, and identifying the emergence of virtualization and software defined networking as forces to profoundly change the industry.

Michel Combes added: “Marcus will combine this vision with the power of Bell Labs to create an unrivalled innovation engine for our company.”

Commenting on his new appointment, Marcus Weldon said: “This is a unique period for the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, and one of unprecedented change. We are seeing a revolution around the delivery of Cloud-based media, content and services to an ever-growing number of mobile devices, anywhere, anytime. We have a range of big challenges to solve, as network operators try to deal with the growing expections for improved performance, while keeping the total cost of operations in check. This is a truly exciting time to become president of Bell Labs. It is where I started my career and where I learned, first hand, the incredible talent and innovation capabilities in this organization. Having been deeply involved with Bell Labs as CTO, and I am thrilled to now to be leading an institution that has been a leading technology innovator for more than 85 years.”

Marcus Weldon takes on the helm of President of Bell Labs from Gee Rittenhouse who has has decided to retire from Alcatel-Lucent in order to focus on other business interests.

About Marcus Weldon

Marcus Weldon has served as Corporate CTO of Alcatel-Lucent since 2009. He joined Bell Labs in 1995, and has held a variety of leadership roles in both research and technology development functions. Dr. Weldon was one of the primary architects behind the evolution of the Triple-Play Service Delivery Architecture to the High Leverage Network™, now the widely accepted industry architecture centered around the principles of ‘all IP, converged wireline / wireless, intelligent, optimized networking’.

Marcus Weldon has also been one of the primary drivers of Alcatel-Lucent’s groundbreaking and award-winning lightRadio™ architecture for next generation wireless networks. As CTO he has helped drive the company in new directions, including the use of sophisticated analytics for optimizing the customer experience and service delivery, and defining the new programmable ‘Cloud Network’ paradigm that will enable the network to emulate computing and become a agile, reconfigurable, consumable platform for innovation and value creation for Cloud services (based on the principles of Software-Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization).

Dr. Weldon was born and raised in the United Kingdom, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Computer Science from King’s College, London. He emigrated to the United States to obtain a Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University, later joining Bell Labs as a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Department. Dr. Weldon won numerous scientific and engineering society awards for his work on electronics and optical materials before becoming CTO of Alcatel-Lucent.

ABOUT ALCATEL-LUCENT (EURONEXT PARIS AND NYSE: ALU)

Alcatel-Lucent is at the forefront of global communications, providing products and innovations in IP and cloud networking, as well as ultra-broadband fixed and wireless access to service providers and their customers, enterprises and institutions throughout the world.

Underpinning Alcatel-Lucent in driving the industrial transformation from voice telephony to high-speed digital delivery of data, video and information is Bell Labs, an integral part of Alcatel-Lucent and one of the world’s foremost technology research institutes, responsible for countless breakthroughs that have shaped the networking and communications industry. Alcatel-Lucent innovations have resulted in the company being recognized by Thomson Reuters as a Top 100 Global Innovator, as well as being named by MIT Technology Review as amongst 2012’s Top 50 “World’s Most Innovative Companies”. Alcatel-Lucent has also been recognized for innovation in sustainability, being named Industry Group Leader for Technology Hardware & Equipment sector in the 2013 Dow Jones Sustainability Indices review for making global communications more sustainable, affordable and accessible, all in pursuit of the company’s mission to realize the potential of a connected world.

With revenues of Euro 14.4 billion in 2012, Alcatel-Lucent is listed on the Paris and New York stock exchanges (Euronext and NYSE: ALU). The company is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris.

For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow the Company on Twitter: external linkhttp://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.

PR Archives: Latest, By Company, By Date