Brief: Alcatel-Lucent Acquires NetDevices

Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent this week acquired privately held NetDevices, a maker of services gateways primarily for smaller, but increasingly feature-rich branch office networks.

NetDevices' Unified Services Gateway helps smaller enterprises and branch offices deliver a converged communications infrastructure encompassing voice, data and security services. By packaging up a "branch-office-in-a-box," NetDevices aims to deliver enterprise-class communications services while minimizing the deployment and management challenges.

Alcatel-Lucent's acquisition would seem to validate the opportunity in providing smaller enterprises with easy-to-manage voice- and data-switching capabilities.