Alcatel-Lucent Enhances the Conversation

Most conferences have a theme or buzzword that permeates the event – Lotusphere was all about “Social Business” and “Go Social,” ShoreTel’s theme was “Beat Complexity” and “Beautiful Simplicity.” Alcatel Lucent Enterprise’s theme and focus this year at its Dynamic Enterprise Tour is “Conversations.” It wasn’t as obvious as some of the other themes, and “Conversations” wasn’t presented on every slide, but it became clear that Conversations was the focus.

As explained by Tom Burns at a previous Dynamic Enterprise Tour event, we’re seeing a shift from voice-centric communications to next-generation communications, where voice isn’t sufficient to fulfill the needs of employees. Voice is outdated when used alone, and we will be seeing a different balance between the various media, and video will play a more important role. ALU Enterprise will enable the concept of “conversations” and provide users with the ability to switch from one medium to another, while enabling context. This means that when users switch from a voice session to a video session, they can seamlessly continue the conversation without losing information about what they were discussing. Burns notes that this provides users with the convenience of multimedia communications while keeping the persistence of communications and bringing context regardless of the moment when you shift from one medium to another. (Note: It appears that what some vendors call sessions, ALU calls conversations).

According to various ALU representatives, conversations involve the federation of devices between the desktop, mobile devices, and the desk phone for a seamless user experience. With the concept of conversations, if a user has three different devices, the system can deliver native handover between the different devices and lets the user switch from one device to another. If someone wants to reach you, if the authorizations are in place and you authorized the person to reach you regardless of device, all of your devices will ring. The idea is that you’re not reaching a person but a device. When you take the call, you can continue the conversation or session and switch to another device. If you need to leave your office, you can continue the conversation on your mobile phone, and if it has video capabilities, you can continue your video communications, or just continue with voice communications.

The Conversation theme was apparent throughout the conference. During an analyst breakout session, ALU’s Craig Walker stated, “Conversations have to be multichannel - people are used to using different channels to communicate, and have to move between channels seamlessly.” He noted that conversations in the enterprise must be multiparty, multi-device, and multi-media, as well as intuitive, user centric, and immersive.

During his keynote, Paul Segre introduced the new OpenTouch architecture, a converged architecture that “Takes customers from where they are today to the world of conversation.” The architecture provides a new abstraction layer called the Conversation Layer (based on the Customer Conversation Manager from Genesys), which combines interactions into a single conversation. This layer provides the User Conversation Manager (User Session Services) and Customer Conversation Manager, in order to hide the complexity of the bottom layers from the applications on top, with the goal of delivering multimedia conversations.

While discussing ALU’s OpenTouch Suite products, Walker noted that it provides “innovation in enabling the conversation in the network. OpenTouch lets the multiparty experience be as simple as dragging and dropping people into a conversation, letting you move conversations from one device to another seamlessly, and easily escalate a voice call to a video call.”

I got to see this first hand via a demo of OpenTouch and ALU’s new MyIC Phone. The new “smart desk phone” has a smartphone interface (touch screen, haptic feedback), with video capabilities, directory, calendar, presence, and IM, and is easy to customize. The OpenTouch Suite works across a variety of devices, including desk phones, smartphones and tablets, letting users move between devices while maintaining the conversation, adding new participants as needed. I got to try out the phone and some of the applications, and it was very impressive and easy to use. Participants can’t tell when one user moves from one device to another, and it really is seamless. The key to its success will be in the applications developed for it. ALU’s partners are busy working on applications to enhance the MyIC Phone, and I hope to see some innovate applications that providing value to customers and help them keep the conversation going.