India is clearly on Ben Verwaayen's mind, the chief operating officer of global telecommunications firm Alcatel-Lucent.

In his own words, India is important for two reasons. "One it is a huge market. It's a market with very creative players, different competing business models and sensitive to new services than any other market. The second reason is the talent and resources it offers."

Verwaayen who recently took over the reins of Alcatel-Lucent is focused on garnering market share and bringing back the telecommunication giant to profitability. Since the merger of France-based Alcatel and, Lucent of US, the company has been facing problems. It has been reporting losses for the six consecutive quarters. The latest was euro 40 million.

Alcatel-Lucent has close to 4,500 people in India engaged in sales, customer support, services, software development and R&D. The country is a major hub for Alcatel-Lucent's R&D activities. The software development centres are located at Gurgaon, Noida, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Verwaayen, however, does not consider India as a low-cost destination. Rather he does not like to use the word offshore in the context of India. "If it is just about cost then I would not have been in India but to some other low-cost country. For me, India is a high talent country," he adds.

As the person who was heading British Telecom's operations before taking over Alcatel-Lucent, he has pushed over a billion dollar of outsourcing work to India.

While he did not say anything specific with regard to outsourcing, he felt that more than outsourcing it is about creating an eco-system and co-sharing. "I see India as the centre of innovation and we would like to work in collaboration with other units. I am very much into best partnership model and it has to be more on the basis of shared resources," said Verwaayen.

Alcatel-Lucent has established Bell Labs Research Centre in Bengaluru. The Centre's mission is to conduct fundamental and applied research in scientific fields related to computing and communications software.