BARQ Systems Alcatel Partnership

Paris-Cairo, July 27, 2006, – Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) announced today that BARQ Systems, a leading IT integrator in Middle East, will join its Business Partner Program and sell Alcatel enterprise solutions to businesses throughout Egypt.

“BARQ Systems is pleased to have joined the Alcatel Business Partner Program, we are confident that Alcatel’s range of user centric solutions will offer our customers a comprehensive feature set and an open architecture for growth and expansion. Our first customer to benefit from this partnership is “The Contact Center Egypt”, one of the five larger players in the contact center business in Egypt, providing business process outsourcing, telemarketing, telesales and telesupport,” said Mahmoud Soliman, President and CEO of BARQ Systems.

“Partnering with IT leaders like BARQ Systems means Alcatel is better able to deliver the efficiency boosting benefits of its enterprise solutions to businesses throughout Egypt since BARQ Systems has a strong knowledge of IP, consultancy, project management and, after sales support that will help them deliver complete solutions to their customers in this important market.” said Pascal Dussiau, General manager for Alcatel enterprise activities in Africa, Middle East, India and Turkey.

Alcatel offers a cutting edge set of solutions for the enterprise segment in the region comprised of Voice over IP, IP infrastructure, secure converged solutions and CTI applications. These solutions will assist BARQ System’s customers looking for integrated IP Infrastructures with advanced voice services and applications that will streamline operation, enhance employee’s productivity, maintain an unprecedented high level of availability and resilience through an Alcatel unified communication architecture in which the user is the focal point.