Telecom mogul Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced the formation of a new managed services joint venture with Alcatel-Lucent, to helm its fixed line and broadband services. The deal, which is valued $500 million, will be stretched over a period of five years.

The yet to be named JV will be jointly owned, with Alcatel-Lucent holding the controlling stake of 74 percent and Airtel holding the remaining 26 percent stake. The JV will have a workforce of 4000 people, pooled in from both Airtel and Alcatel-Lucent.

As a part of the joint venture, Alcatel-Lucent will design, plan, deploy, optimize and manage Bharti Airtel’s Broadband and telephone network across the country and will assist Airtel transform to Next Generation Networks.

Describing the association to be different from their earlier signed mobility partnerships, Manoj Kohli, CEO and Joint Managing Director, Bharti Airtel referred to the latest alliance as more engaging.

While making the announcement, Mr. Kohli said, “The Joint Venture is another step towards Bharti Airtel’s vision to continuously redefine and deliver the benchmarks of customer experience. We will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s global expertise in IP transformation and network management while allowing us to focus on customer delivery and market growth.”

Furthering the comment, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent said, ‘We appreciate the opportunity that bharti Airtel has given us to demonstrate our world wide expertise in network transformation, managed network services and IP transformation.”

Bharti Airtel and Alcatel-Lucent are set to announce a CEO for the JV shortly.

The development is another industry first from Bharti which had few years back entered into outsourcing contract with Ericsson for its wireless network and with IBM for IT activities. The company has also outsourced its customer services processes to IBM and Firstsource.