Aruba Networks, a global leader in secure mobility solutions, and Alcatel-Lucent today announced their intent to establish a joint venture focused on developing next-generation wired and wireless solutions for the enterprise.

Together, the two companies will drive a new phase of business-critical enterprise infrastructure for a new generation of business users. The solution will be designed to identify, authenticate, and manage users regardless of the means by which they access the network, something no other enterprise system provides today.

The joint venture will focus on the design and delivery of hardware and software modules that add secure wireless LAN switching to Alcatel-Lucent’s next generation products. These modules, used in combination with Alcatel-Lucent platforms, will address the growing need for pervasive secure mobility in Enterprises of any size.

Alcatel-Lucent will market and sell a best-of-class mobility solution that combines Aruba’s secure mobile technology with Alcatel-Lucent’s wired network infrastructure and communication/collaboration applications suite. The resulting platform will be designed to allow enterprises to experience the many benefits of secure mobility, including unparalleled mobile communication and collaboration user experience, without comprising the integrity of their business critical network traffic.

Aruba’s user-centric networking technology securely extends enterprise networks and applications to users, regardless of their locale and independent of the network over which they communicate. By associating security policies with users, instead of ports or hardware, the policies can be enforced independently of how or where a user accesses the network. This unique follow-me security capability provides unprecedented mobility for users while ensuring that security is always enforced.

“Integrating Aruba’s user-centric networking technology with Alcatel-Lucent’s next-generation of LAN switches, unified messaging and teleconferencing systems, and mobile access switches will usher in a new class of converged mobility infrastructure,” said Dominic Orr, Aruba’s president and CEO. “The resulting solution will deliver best-of-class connectivity and switching, enhance the productivity of mobile users, and ensure the reliable delivery of business-critical applications within even the largest enterprises.”

“This venture will combine Alcatel-Lucent’s infrastructure with Aruba’s strength in secure mobility solutions to create network solutions for the new business generation — ones which are capable of meeting the needs of an ‘always on communications’ generation who want access anywhere, any time,” said Tom Burns, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Solutions activities. “In creating a new class of infrastructure, our companies will deliver a faster, denser, business critical mobile solution that enterprises need to transform their networks for a technological competitive edge.”

Alcatel-Lucent was among the first major enterprise players to market a fixed mobile convergence solution that seamlessly switches between enterprise Wi-Fi networks and public mobile phone networks. The company’s comprehensive communication application suite encompasses data, voice, video, LAN, and public switched networking solutions.