RIYADH, 16 May  — Under the Telephone Expansion Program (TEP-6), Lucent Technologies has awarded contracts worth over SR15 billion to Saudi suppliers and contractors for its projects in the Kingdom as part of its commitment to contribute to the national economy.

In a joint interview with Arab News at the Bell Labs Technology seminar, Michael Craft, president, Lucent Technologies International Inc. (Saudi Arabian Branch), and Muhammad Al-Dhalaan, director of public affairs and public relations, said that as part of this commitment they are organizing a workshop at King Faisal Hall tomorrow in which Lucent’s will interface with senior officials from KACST and the educational institutions.

Hopefully, the exchange of ideas between BL scientists and the academicians should lead to cooperation between the two sides, he observed. Lucent Technologies’ president also announced that his company, in collaboration with Sound Advantage, will work together to incorporate the next generation speech recognition engine into the Sound Advantage line of unified messaging systems.

This would help to improve accuracy, recognition speed and language capabilities of the messaging systems. “It will be a major breakthrough in advanced speech technology that would make reliable speech recognition over the phone a reality,” he said. Asked about Lucent’s role in facilitating technology transfer to the Kingdom, Craft said that in partial fulfillment of its commitment to the Kingdom’s Economic Offset Program, Lucent has set up International Network Engineering (INE), a joint venture with International Systems Engineering (ISE).

A local Saudi company, Lucent and ISE are equal partners in INE, which has generated revenues of over SR680 million in four years. Approximately 32 percent of its workforce are Saudis. Al-Dhalaan said they have trained over 800 Saudi employees who have logged in 58,686 man-hours in computer applications, technical products training, management courses, quality, safety, etc.

It has also provided 524,888 man-hours of training through the Telecom College Graduate Program and 123,480 man-hours of training under the Cooperative Students/Trainees Program, besides 479,416 man-hours under its summer training and high-tech training programs. Referring to Lucent’s joint ventures in the Kingdom, he said the company has a tie-up with Advanced Electronics Co. Ltd. (AEC), an economic offset company, in assembling and testing 5ESS digital switching cabinets and in manufacturing circuit boards for switching and transmission equipment. AEC, he said, has manufactured over 155,000 switching circuit packs (about 2.4 million lines) and 22,500 transmission packs).