Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) on Monday named Gee Rittenhouse the new president of Bell Labs, replacing Jeong Kim, who is returning to South Korea to serve as that country's minister of Future Creation and Science.
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Gee Rittenhouse. (Image source: Alcatel-Lucent) |
After Kim leaves Alcatel-Lucent, the functions of CTO and Corporate Strategy will be managed by the company's CEO.
Rittenhouse has plenty of experience to lead Bell Labs.
Prior to becoming the COO of Alcatel-Lucent's technology platforms business, he served as the VP of Bell Labs Research from 2007 to 2011. Inside Bell Labs, he served as chair of the GreenTouch consortium, which is focused on driving energy efficiency in communications networks.
One of the major initiatives that GreenTouch has developed is a Bit-Interleaved passive optical network technology (Bi-PON), which it claims can help FTTH customers reduce their power consumption by a factor or 10. Bi-PON achieves the lower power consumption by choosing the destination of data bits and dropping those that are unnecessary before they undergo processing.
While analyst forecasts about FTTH growth vary widely, ABI Research forecast that it will reach 142 million subscribers worldwide by 2012. GreenTouch claims that by applying Bi-PON in FTTH networks, the impact on the carbon footprint would be the same as taking half a million cars off the roads.
Rittenhouse's appointment comes at a transitional time for the Franco-American vendor. Earlier this month, Ben Verwaayen announced that he would step down as CEO of the company after it finds a replacement.
For more:
- see the release
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