* Alcatel-Lucent claims the industry’s first service routing certification
Alcatel-Lucent launched what it claims to be the industry’s first service routing certification program for IP professionals in the service provider market.
The program aims to teach candidates the skills and competencies required to design, deploy, troubleshoot and maintain fixed and mobile networks for next-generation services, such as triple-play, IPTV, VPN, VoIP over carrier networks, and video-on-demand.
Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP activity, says the current crop of advanced networking certifications, such as Cisco’s CCIE and the Juniper equivalent, is focused at the IP protocol-level. Alcatel-Lucent’s program teaches students how to design, configure and validate services on top of the network. Much of the focus will be to understand the relationship between the services and the underlying protocol, says Newell.
There are three certification tracks: the entry-level Network-Routing Specialist, the Triple Play Routing Professional (3RP), and the advanced Service Routing Architect.
The NRS program involves one training course and one written exam, and is aimed at network architects and operations engineers with experience of MPLS networks. The 3RP track involves eight training courses and eight written exams, and is aimed at individuals with several years experience of service provider networks. It discusses voice, video and data networks. Finally, the SRA designation is aimed at engineers with many years of MPLS experience and may already hold the top-level certifications from other network providers. It involves 11 courses, 11 written exams, and a one-day lab exam. According to Newell, individuals who have already taken the program have said the lab exam is tougher than the lab tests of other vendors.
The courses are between two days and a week long and are only available at the company’s four training centers around the world.
