Collaboration through OpenTouch
The reach of consumer technology into the workplace has changed the conversation and caused businesses to examine the next steps in deploying flexible and performance enabling communications tools that support the day to day routine of employees.
Today, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise announced the expansion of its OpenTouch™ Suite that supports mid and large enterprises as they make the experience of the many new faces of conversations available to customers, partners and employees. The OpenTouch Suite 1.2 offers more visual collaboration and mobility experiences with flexible deployment to meet the needs of today’s businesses.
Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Suite 1.2 revolutionizes visual communications, providing new user experiences. With OpenTouch, conversations are naturally continuous and persistent over time. The latest update OpenTouch Suite 1.2 enriches communication before, during and after the conversation, so that employees can plan, record, store, share conversations and “socialize” them afterwards.
- Before the conversation, video enriches invitations to meetings and conference sessions, replacing long text agendas by short video clips. OpenTouch Conversation clients enable users to record a video invitation or send an instant video message.
- During the conversation, the embedded multiparty, multimedia collaboration capabilities of OpenTouch 1.2 provide full ad hoc or scheduled conversations utilizing multiple media across devices such as PCs, tablets, interactive whiteboards and LifeSize video endpoints. This helps organizations improve the effective collaboration of virtual teams and a dispersed, mobile workforce. The 8082 MyIC Phone supports a visual conversation as easily as a phone call with the addition of video through a simple tap of the screen.
- After the conversation, the OpenTouch Video Store, a cloud-based solution that enables enterprises to record, store and share conversations helps broaden the collaborative conversation, reach a wider audience, while maximizing the impact of communication. In this release, it supports a new native iPad client, downloaded from the iTunes App Store and new editing capabilities to enhance and provide context to those recordings.
Additionally, OpenTouch 1.2 supports new devices including the IP Touch 8002 and 8012 phones, which leverage the same sleek and modern design as the award-wining 8082 My IC Phone. These offer a cost optimized state-of-the-art companion phone for desktop users, while new DECT on-site mobile handsets give employees more cost-effective mobile options in the office.
The technology of OpenTouch is also driving the shift to the Personal Cloud, as more customers and Business Partners’ recognize the benefits of a service based offer:
- OpenTouch is VMware certified enabling virtualization of all elements of the OpenTouch architecture, the OmniPCX Enterprise, the OpenTouch Multimedia Service and the 8770 management system. Virtualization makes deployment and business models of OpenTouch and its applications more flexible to suit the needs of mid and large enterprises. The virtualization capabilities reduce costs while improving the ability to make changes without headaches. The OpenTouch Suite is hardware agnostic, and deployable in data centers running VmWare 5.0, ESXi 5.0 or the complete vSphere solution.
- New pricing of the OpenTouch Multimedia system software enables existing customers to “taste” and adopt the new user experience.
