At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum in Paris last week, attendees had a chance to hear about Alcatel-Lucent’s (ALU’s) UC products and strategy – and to enjoy beautiful Paris, of course. As I wrote in an article about the event and ALU’s approach toward “the Dynamic Enterprise” (see SearchUnifiedCommunications at http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid186_gci1302545,00.html) ALU has a great UC story, but unfortunately, most people in North America haven’t heard it.

ALU provides several different UC solutions for customers based on what desktop and telephony environment the customer has. The company provides connectors and middleware out of the box for both Microsoft and IBM environments, as well as APIs that can be used by customers and third-party partners.

My Instant Communicator is a new UC client that federates all of ALU’s UC services and flows of communications into a single interface. Providing a consistent user interface over various devices, My Instant Communicator offers four different services: telephony, messaging, conferencing (via My Teamwork) and one number service. My Instant Communicator lets users access voice, IM, voice mail, email and other services from anywhere with the same user experience via a single interface. One of the key features of My Instant Communicator is that it is non-intrusive and runs in the tray and essentially pops up when you need it, managing incoming communications through “toast” windows. Several types of toasts are provided, such as for an incoming voice call or instant message, notification of scheduled conferences, notification of someone joining a conference, and notification when a designated contact logs in. For the voice call toast, users can see who’s calling and can answer the call on the phone, respond or answer via IM, forward to voice mail, forward to a mobile phone, turn it into a video call, etc. ALU notes that My Instant Communicator is the first step towards a user-centric approach rather than a device-centric approach.

For Microsoft LCS/OCS customers, ALU integrates its OmniPCX Enterprise switch via Genesys Enterprise Telephony Software, or GETS (Genesys is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ALU). GETS, which integrates with a large number of different IP, TDM, and hybrid PBXs, provides remote call control via SIP/CSTA, will be integrated into the next release of OmniPBX Enterprise.

For customers with IBM Sametime, ALU offers a plug in to integrate its OmniTouch Unified Communication software with Lotus Sametime. OmniTouch My Teamwork for IBM Lotus Sametime ties in Lotus Sametime’s instant messaging, presence services, and web conferencing capabilities with ALU’s OmniTouch My Teamwork audioconferencing and collaboration product. The OmniTouch My Teamwork for Lotus Sametime is a free plug-in that provides the ability to click-to-conference directly from both Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes, as well as to provide audio-conference scheduling and management from Lotus Sametime's Web conferencing feature. From a contact window, users can click-to-conference, start an instant group call with a single click, etc. In addition, My Instant Communicator supports both Lotus Notes and Sametime.

ALU also offers communication enabled business process capabilities via free web XML interfaces to integrate telephony functions into business applications. I would have liked to hear more CEBP customer examples, but they’re working on it.

The main point is that there is no “one size fits all” and Alcatel-Lucent offers a variety of ways to access UC capabilities, regardless of the desktop or PBX environment. At the Forum, we heard from some happy customers who have implemented ALU’s UC solutions, and satisfied customers is what it’s all about.