The 2011 Frost & Sullivan Europe ICT Award for Most Innovative European Communications Product of the Year is presented to Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for its new OpenTouch suite of communications platforms. OpenTouch is a suite of open communications platforms that enable medium and large enterprises to fully leverage SIP technology for flexibility of deployment, protection of their legacy infrastructure, a wider choice of user devices, and delivering collaboration applications.
“This unique offering allows users to migrate with great ease from communications that are primarily voice centric and one-to-one, to a solution that delivers multimedia, multi-party communications,” notes Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Dorota Oviedo. “Users can select the most appropriate medium for communication and add or remove sessions, or ‘conversation’ participants in real-time, as their business needs dictate – and they can do it over any device.”
OpenTouch will allow enterprises to take advantage of the five main benefits of SIP communications: drive cost reduction by consolidating access points, provide choice of devices, federate existing communication systems, enable applications to run on different communications platforms, and deliver multimedia conversations.
With OpenTouch, collaboration between employees or between businesses and customers is able to seamlessly shift from one communications device to another, for instance, from a smartphone to a video conferencing endpoint. Moreover, it can move from one mode to another — such as voice to video session escalation – and with enterprises able to manage this all from a single console.
“Importantly, the OpenTouch suite can advance enterprise use of social media and visual collaboration,” adds Oviedo. “It provides support for next generation end-points – such as Alcatel-Lucent’s My IC Phone, a ‘smart deskphone’ that serves as an application pod, allowing for personalised services and industry-specific applications.”
“Another innovative offering is the OpenTouch Federation Services solution which is anticipated to be commercially available in the fourth quarter of 2011,” concludes Oviedo. “It enlabes businesses to consolidate SIP trunking and dialling plans for multi-vendor PBXs.”
Federation Services use SIP to connect the legacy Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX PBX with other vendor’s platforms. Consequently, businesses can implement this architecture to streamline and optimise their communications in an integrated, mixed- environment, without the need for rip and replace of their existing systems.
“We’re honored to receive this award from Frost & Sullivan,” said Tom Burns, President, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “Our new OpenTouch platforms are opening up a new world of applications and devices for both employee engagement and customer service. Together with our customers, we are changing the conversation across the enterprise.”
The Most Innovative European Communications Product of the Year Award is conferred on the most pioneering and groundbreaking enterprise communications solution that has been launched in Europe within last year. The contenders for this Award were evaluated on the following key criteria: innovation, go-to-market strategy and market potential. With this award Frost and Sullivan intends to recognise companies that have introduced products and services that are truly unique, future-proof, and at the same time have brought real value to business users.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognise companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.
