Alcatel-Lucent unveils cloud solutions

Alcatel-Lucent today announced a new suite of solutions to help enterprises migrate to the cloud.

All this will help enterprise users to opt for more cost effective business models as they can address the challenge of delivering communications services for a highly mobile, application-driven workforce.

Alcatel-Lucent is building on strength of its innovative, award winning OpenTouch architecture for mid-to-large enterprises and SMBs by introducing its third offer, the OpenTouch Suite for Cloud. This will enable such enterprises to meet the high communications expectations of today's workplace brought on by the popularity of smartphones, tablets and the ‘Bring Your Own Device' trend.

The new offer will contain three segmented solutions: the Enterprise Cloud, the Office Cloud and the Personal Cloud.The first from this suite, the OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud Solution, is available today and enables service providers, system integrators and channels to deliver Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) giving employees the collaborative experience they want.

The OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud solution combines the rich conversation experience of OpenTouch with Alcatel-Lucent's OmniPCX Enterprise success in telephony, video, instant messaging, presence, conferencing and Web collaboration to bring the ultimate collaboration experience all accessible from the cloud.

It is a software suite, is hardware agnostic and fully virtualized for easy deployment and adoption. Its architectural advantages make it possible to deploy all in the cloud or as an overlay to an existing CPE-based telephony infrastructure with minimum disruption to operations.

Alcatel-Lucent's first three strategic partners for OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud include external linkIcon Voice Networks in the United States, external linkSwitch Communications in the UK, and external linkUXC Connect in Australia.

These partners will provide their customers with an innovative, cost-effective, secure solution that delivers a collaborative experience from any device. Based on an innovative yet flexible RTU (right-to-use) elastic software license, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise business partners can now offer the OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud solution in a flexible SaaS cloud model, enabling a wide range of user devices to collaborate within and beyond the enterprise.

Michel Emelianoff, president, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, said "This new offer is based on OpenTouch, a next generation and polymorphic architecture, which offers the same technology deployed on the premise, in the cloud or a combination of both. We see the level of excitement already generated with our partners and are working to further expansions in other markets as we speak.

Today's announcement is only the beginning of our efforts to bring the enterprise closer to the cloud. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is committed to delivering solutions that enable cloud services for the enterprise from a variety of approaches, be it business driven or user driven."