Transcript for Craig Walker and David Buckley from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Discuss OpenTouch
Blair Pleasant: This is Blair Pleasant, in Barcelona at the Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Enterprise Tour and I am with Craig Walker and David Buckley. And they are talking about OpenTouch, the new Alcatel-Lucent multi-media communication software suite. So what are some of the key takeaways that you want people to understand about OpenTouch?
Craig Walker: Well the first thing that we want people to understand is the fact that this is a user-centric software suite, as opposed to device centric. So this is where we have the communication really terminates on the user or with the user, as opposed to the device that you are actually using at the time. This means that they can swap between any device to any other device seamlessly during that communication, whilst keeping the context of that conversation.
David Buckley: So that is the application and to support that what we have done is built SIP in at the core, using web services that support SIP as well. But what the SIP part does, is enables those multi-media conversations. So built into the SIP protocol, we have obviously IM, we have presence, we have video, and we have voice. We expose it to our applications, so our customers and our clients can get the full visibility across the application suite, as described by Craig.
One of the other interesting things is that we’ve added video into this as a native component. So SIP is helping to build the conversations with video. We have a video MCU that is built into the platform, so video really is becoming a part of the dial tone, part of the system capabilities.
Blair Pleasant: And then customers don’t have to spend money on an extra MCU?
David Buckley: Correct.
Craig Walker: And the flexibility of the system means that we can actually deploy this and have a choice of deployment, whether this is on the CPE, whether it's hosted or managed, in the cloud or even in the IMS. So we’re able to have the full high bit wherever you are in that spectrum, you can have the multiple deployment options, so you can actually deploy this where and when you want. And the other thing about it that is new is the management and simplified user management, which means that all of these user applications that you have, have a single management system to be able to do this very easily. And that brings down the –
Blair Pleasant: The TCO?
Craig Walker: The TCO,it brings down the number of parameters you have to deal with, from over a hundred down to just 15.
David Buckley: I think another point here is of course what we’ve tried to do here is for our customers who made important investments on the PC enterprise platform, that this becomes part of the architecture, so it's a smooth transformation over from the voice centric world and now to the multi-media centric user-centric world. So OXE is future-proof. It's part of the equation, it's part of the solution, as you know OXE runs SIP, so for end points, for applications, for SIP trunking, OXE can be inserted into the equation and becomes part of the overall OpenTouch solution.
Blair Pleasant: And BiCS as well?
David Buckley: Of course.
Craig Walker: And this is part of the evolution – BiCS was a cost effective solution for the mid-market, with a single server solution. OpenTouch is exactly the same. We have all of these applications pre-integrated into a single industry standard server, which means that you can actually bring all of these applications together and have something that is accessible to the mid and large, or the lower end of the large, so we have within that single server, 1,500 users or 3,000 devices that you can actually deploy.
Blair Pleasant: Okay. Well thank you both very much.