The pledge by Ben Verwaayen, the new CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, to integrate the troubled company is looking like the 12 labors of Hercules and he may not have much time to carry out the tasks.
"We need to move quickly to become an integrated company," Verwaayen told reporters in Paris Tuesday after he took over the top operational post of Alcatel (NYSE: ALU)-Lucent.

Merged as equals two years ago, the company has been racked by massive layoffs, management bickering, and a plunging stock price. The management change is designed to deal more effectively with those problems.

In the U.S., the Lucent side of the business has projects in all the top wireless infrastructure architectures that are increasingly eclipsing older landline schemes. The trick for Verwaayen will be to pick the winning architectures from the smorgasbord of advanced schemes that include CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and B, W-CDMA, WiMax, LTE, and UMTS/HSPA while keeping up with older landline architectures like DSL and advancing cable and fiber optic modem technologies.

Verwaayen said he plans to spend the next few months talking with customers before zeroing in on some technologies. Its major U.S. customer, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless, has committed to moving to LTE from CDMA, while another major customer, AT&T (NYSE: T), is utilizing UMTS/HSPA technology from Alcatel-Lucent and others, before it moves to LTE. Still another wireless technology -- WiMax, both fixed and mobile -- is also being deployed.

Verwaayen and Philippe Camus, who was named non-executive chairman of the merged company, didn't exactly get a ringing vote of confidence in their appointments as Alcatel-Lucent's stock dropped more than 5% on the news of their appointment.

With the company's latest financial report -- a $1.7 billion quarterly loss announced in July -- still fresh, the company may be faced with initiating more onerous layoffs, although Verwaayen indicated they aren't in the immediate offing.

"I'm no fan of big reorganizations," he told reporters.

Source:InformationWeek