At an Analyst Briefing this week, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise revealed new branding and a re-casting of its amalgam of Contact Center (from Genesys), Communications and Network infrastructure offerings under the OpenTouch brand. The inclusion of the word “Open” in the new brand signifies that the company and its go-to-market partners and integrators are making liberal use of well-understood standards, especially SIP and the relevant flavors of XML (like ccXML, VoiceXML and scXML) with multi-vendor interfaces supported by MSML/MRCP.

These technologies are assembled into an architecture (and vision) designed to foster more conversational commerce. Core to the approach is the Conversation Manager, designed to bring more context (such as customer influence, device being used, location, history, etc) to bear while determining how to treat a call or other input. The key take-away was that Genesys has felt real “pull” from customers (both existing and new) for its “listening and analytics” resources, WFO (workforce optimization) and reporting and iWD (intelligent Workload Distribution).

While many of the resources are the product of Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys and Bell Labs, the OpenTouch brand and adherence to standards means that many solutions can augment the home-grown capabilities with products from third parties like Lithium (a relationship announced at G-Force in May 2010), Radian6 or others that social media-oriented customers might prescribe.

The heightened interest in WFO, analytics and social “engagement” was made tangible by customer presentations from Ticketmaster, Groupama (an insurance carrier in Lyon, France, that built a quite impressive iPhone app that exemplifies the “open” approach by integrating Asterisk with Genesys SIP server, reporting and WFO) and Kansas City-based real estate brokerage Reece & Nichols. The Reece & Nichols use case showed such dramatic cost savings from moving its traffic to SIP trunks from the telco-provided switched voice and data services to SIP that we can only expect the migration to accelerate.

That portends an uptick in sales for the #ALUenterprise’s SIP-based, socially engaged solutions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, Contact Center, Social Media, Recombinant Communications, self-service