An international voice, data and video communication solutions provider headquartered in Paris today unveiled upgrades to products that help large enterprises make more money while helping workers improve productivity and customer service.

 

Officials at Alcatel-Lucent say their so-called “Corporate Communications Solutions” include unified communications and contact center solutions that help large business customers use data virtualization with increased scalability and centralization in the network.

 

Since launching the solutions nearly two years ago, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has added more than 5,000 new enterprise customers. IT industry insiders have hailed Alcatel-Lucent’s offering as helping enterprises balance better cost control with more effective business communications, and the company’s customers say the new IP network has changed the way they do business.

 

Today, as part of its updated solution, Alcatel-Lucent launched a new OmniSwitch 9000E, which is designed to save large enterprises money through hardware consolidation and lower power consumption.

 

TMCnet had a chance to speak to Patrick Thorel, director of large enterprise solutions marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, about the new solution, as well as about how this slower economy is fueling interest in unified platforms and the lure of VoIP for large enterprises.

 

As Thorel says during the interview, below, VoIP’s major draw for those companies isn’t cost-savings, but gaining a platform for voice application integration and innovation.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

Patrick Thorel (pictured left): The business imperatives today are to save money and make money. CIOs are focusing on cost control and productivity, rather than growth strategies. This is leading to a change in the spending priorities, with centralization, server consolidation and cost of ownership being main targets. The need to leverage existing investments and infrastructures is key, allied to the ability to “do more with less,” both in terms of equipment and people.

 

To control costs, enterprises are looking for solutions that can be supported easily, provide quick return-on-investment and time to operation. To gain the productivity benefits, these solutions need to integrate easily into their existing environments, be quickly adopted by their employees and available wherever, whichever device and whatever the underlying infrastructure.

 

For those enterprises that have recognized the need to integrate the new communications applications into the heart of their business processes, unified platforms and pre-integrated applications have a number of benefits. They simplify the implementation and adoption of new features and functionality and reduce costs in terms of deployment, running and support.

 

Unified communications and collaboration applications have been perceived as complex and expensive, difficult to integrate and requiring multiple platforms. Alcatel-Lucent has long been focused on simplification of deployment, use and support and reduction of required hardware.

 

PT: CFOs are watching expenses, including travel costs and even how much office space they use, and they are asking CIOs to deploy solutions to control these expenses.

 

Regarding travel cost reductions, collaboration and triple play conferencing are key money savers that can be deployed using Alcatel-Lucent solutions. Unlike most of the other vendor solutions, these are suitable regardless of the existing infrastructure because they work on all PBXs, or on Centrex or soft switch systems. And they are accessible from any telephone handset, all workstations, and can be deployed either inside or outside of the enterprise firewalls. In addition, the ROI can be compared to a service provider’s solution and show results from a couple of months to one year.

 

These mobility solutions also impact office costs because they can enable “home worker” and “free seating” environments that re-create the office atmosphere wherever the employee is.

 

 

PT: SIP devices may be cheaper to initially purchase, but they typically lack the features and manageability of standard digital handsets. The demand today from our customers is for a high level of telephony business features on standard SIP devices. These SIP handsets must use the managed SIP standard because these are the only devices to give the promise of advanced functionality, multimedia communications and cost savings. The market still perceives that SIP maturity and full productivity is one to two years from now.

 

 

PT: We find that large enterprises are very interested in VoIP as a cost savings mechanism. But the bigger draw is that they now have a platform for voice application integration and innovation. All of sudden, companies see new ways to leverage that VoIP system with other applications to improve productivity and sales. Integration with unified communications, contact center and other applications are examples of this.

 

PT: On Monday we’re announcing the Alcatel-Lucent Corporate Communication Solutions product offering that includes voice, data, unified communications and contact center products aimed at providing large corporations with a complete networking solution. As part of this updated solution, the new OmniSwitch 9000E can allow large enterprises to achieve significant cost reduction through hardware consolidation and lower power consumption. One innovative addition is bringing MPLS to the enterprise. The OmniSwitch 9000E supports MPLS-ready features such as multiple virtual route forwarding which allows enterprises to partition or segregate their applications and/or servers in their data centers. The MPLS-ready features also allow large campus enterprises to protect mission critical data and enhance network performance by implementing virtual partitioning of users and network resources.