Bring on Ben. Could BT's newly-departed CEO be the saviour of Alcatel Lucent?

After all, before he took over at BT, on January 14, 2002, Ben Verwaayen had been at Lucent technologies (from 1997, in fact) and held the position of  vice chairman of the management board, so it's not as if he doesn't understand what Lucent was all about - then. It's a moot point as to whether anyone knows what Alcatel Lucent is all about now, but knowing Ben, I'm pretty sure he'd soon find out.

Mr. Verwaayen has just left BT with praises ringing in his ears after five great years as the CEO of the UK's big incumbent operator. Ben and the senior management team he put together deserve the plaudits for turning British Telecom from a moribund, navel-gazing, stick-in the-mud operator that was mired in the past into a forward thinking, fast moving organisation that is leading the world by implementing the world's first all-IP 21st Century Network.

My suggestion that he might go to Alcatel Lucent was no more than a throwaway, off-the-cuff thought but, having mulled it over, I have come round to thinking that it's not such a far-fetched notion after all.

To start with Alcatel isn't all that much smaller than BT in terms of employee numbers - the operator has just over 90,000 staff and Alcatel Lucent (even after its latest round of job cuts) has 77,000. Alright, it could be perceived as a bit of a step down in some quarters but what a challenge the job would be for the decidedly feisty and feistily determined Ben Verwaayen. If anyone could pick up Alcatel Lucent by the scruff of the neck and give it the shaking it so desperately needs and deserves, it is he.

The Alcatel Lucent merger was always presented to a sceptical world as a "marriage of equals made in heaven". However, from the off it was obvious that the union was nothing of the kind. Alcatel was always the lead partner and had the most products whilst Lucent always seemed more of a one-trick-pony and far, too dependent on CDMA technology.

Soon the prolonged effects of trying to ram a square Yankee peg into a round French hole began to tell and the marriage ran into trouble with the bride spending most of her time in the parental home in the US whilst the groom was domiciled in Paris.

Shortly after the merger, reliable sources told me that as it became evident that things weren't going quite as swimmingly as expected Serge Tchuruk, the chairman of Alcatel Lucent, had offered to make the ultimate sacrifice for a Frenchman and volunteered to move over to the gastronomic wasteland that is New Jersey for a couple of years if it would help cement the union. In all the ego-mania, politicking and jostling for position that characterised the early (and, indeed, the latter) days of the merger, M. Tchuruk's offer was spurned and he didn't renew it.

Meanwhile, other stories were circulating - to the effect that Patricia Russo did not like France, didn't like travelling there and either would not or could not learn the language - and this made her seem to the French public to be aloof and overly US-centric: a perception that was assiduously burnished by the French media.

Alcatel and Lucent combined for the worst possible reasons, rather than the best. As the telecoms recession bit, companies panicked and jumped far too quickly into consolidation exercses that, like marriages entered in haste, are now being repented at leisure.