Bell Labs, the indusrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has launched what it said is a discrete consultancy providing services and techo-economic modelling tools designed to help the IT and communications networking industries.

The firm claimed its experience makes it particularly well positioned to help defining future networking strategies, and said by 2020 the technology industry will have to rethink how networks are built, deployed and managed.

“Our industry is undergoing a transformational shift as we enter a new era, driven by the digitisation and connection of everything and everyone, and build converged networks that [are] capable of handling the diverse and dynamic demand patterns,”  said Marcus Weldon, President of Bell Labs.

According to Bell Labs, in the next five years metro video traffic will increase nine-fold, data centre and cloud will grow metro traffic six-fold, and global mobile content demand will increase traffic by 31 times the current situation.

“For customers this transformation from a physical to a complete digital delivery infrastructure for the future can be a minefield to navigate, in terms of understanding the right economic models, the key technologies, how they work together to create new solution capabilities, and the relative priority they should have in order to optimise the TCO and drive growth and profitability.

“Our intent is to provide the decision framework, and the set of key innovations and sequencing of adoption that will help ensure they not only survive but prosper well into in the future.”

The company said the consulting division will consist of multi-disciplinary scientists, technologists, modelers and solution and service experts whose technical fields include SDN, NFV, cloud, wireless, fixed acess, optical networking and IP routing.

The outfit will also offer revenue modelling and operations optimisation, and Bell Labs claimed it will have vertical expertise including defence communications, private sector networking, and utilities and rail. To lead the operation, Bell Labs has appointed Cassidy Shield, who previously worked as Alcatel-Lucent’s software business Marketing Head.