Alcatel-Lucent financials due to linking network service opportunities?

Alcatel-Lucent announced its earnings yesterday and the results were a sharp contrast with Cisco’s, sending Alcatel-Lucent’s stock up more than twice the percentage that Cisco’s fell. The most impressive fact was that revenues increased in all geographies and product sectors.

If you couple this with Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio announcement, too late to impact the latest numbers, you wonder whether the company may not be finally getting it together. Another implication is that if nobody is effectively linking service opportunities vertically through the network, then the guy with products in every part of the network has an edge. For Cisco, that may be another reason to get serious about service-layer strategy.