In furthering Alcatel-Lucent’s theme of the dynamic engagement, the company announced the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch™ 8082 My IC Phone at VoiceCon in Orlando. In a pre-briefing on the product Alcatel-Lucent said “Alcatel-Lucent is making an announcement which will dramatically change the employee, developer and customer experiences and will redefine the notion of engagement”.

To start off, this is one nice looking desktop phone, with a 7” wide capacitive touch screen, that is LED backlit, and provides connectivity to Bluetooth and USB devices. Functionally, ALU paid attention to both the form (adjustable base) and audio components of the phone. It provides full duplex wide-band communications, and has a large loudspeaker built in. The phone provides for seamless transfer between the desk phone and mobile devices.

ALU put a lot of work into creating a new user interface to make the phone far more functional, and in line with providing users access to information, and unified communications capabilities. For example, the phone gives users screen access to instant messaging, presence, contextual applications, and email, and allows the user to play MP3 music for personal ring tones as well. ALU is keenly aware of the user experience, building business context across the user interaction, taking into account presence, location, social networks, and what the user’s business needs are.

Additionally, new applications for the phone will be available when the phone is generally available (year-end) that will be developed by ALU and their developer community. Companies are always talking about “rich user experience”, and Alcatel-Lucent is no different. We still have a few months until the phone ships, but the company spoke of a tailored set of applications for financial services, such as real-time video and twitter feeds from traders, as examples of what could be provided through the phone.

As for this added application development, ALU is using its Developer Application portal, which already has more than 10,000 active developers, to create applications for the new phone. The new phone serves as an application pod that has an open API developer platform, and will be integrated with ALU’s next generation of unified communications services (stay tuned for more announcements during the year). The Developer portal will be accessible to developers starting in Q2. All applications

Finally, besides the look of the phone, I was completely pleased when I asked ALU a question about power consumption, because green is a big point with me. Alcatel-Lucent has gone above and beyond on that score, as this is the first desk phone product to comply with the European Code of Conduct, which forces companies to be green, by requiring a limit of one watt of consumption when the screen is off and less than two watts when the screen is on – and this is a seven inch screen! Nice. In addition, ALU designed the product for long life, and went for minimal packaging, with no paper being delivered with the product – instead they provide an online manual.

Today Voxeo took some of its burgeoning war chest to make another key acquisition that bolsters its unified communications offering. It’s also a critical component in Voxeo’s Unified Self-Service strategy, which I’ll talk more about below.

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Things really picked up in unified communications in the third quarter as it was back to school for everyone. This is despite the fact that we didn’t have any big shows during the summer except for SpeechTek. Q4 should be even more interesting, however, as VoiceCon is coming up. Here is the made up song again, with a smattering of things that happened in some of the categories. Next time I blog a song, it will be a short one!

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Last week when Blair Pleasant and I had finished our UC end user benefits study we did a webinar on the findings that was sponsored by Genesys and CMP. Out of that we had a number of follow up questions from the audience, including quite a few from our colleague Art Rosenberg, who posted a review of the study on UC Strategies.com.

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On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.
It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.

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It’s December. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, plus I’m not a unified communications vendor, so I don’t have a New Year’s resolution list for how I can help further the development of unified communications. I also don’t care to blog about my UC predictions for 2008, as there are plenty of others out there who will probably do that. However, I’m capable of believing in Santa, and as one of my friend’s tells her children when they ask her about Santa – “You have to believe to receive.” So, I thought I would put together my wish list for the Twelve Days of Unified Communications, with some help from my friends in the industry. I talked to a dozen or so vendors on what they would like to see happen in UC in 2008, and whether they had any input as to how they are helping further these wishes. Not surprisingly, in many cases these wishes reflected their own ongoing initiatives or pet peeves (attributions of which I have left off for reasons of anonymity). However, for the most part they tended to have a lot of commonality in what they wish for.

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It was a slow week in Telecom, UC, etc., or at least last week felt that way. Perhaps, other than hearing that Wes Hayden left his position as CEO of Genesys to become president of Nuance’s Enterprise Communications division, a lot of announcements seemed aimed at keeping attention on the big player’s UC offerings, ahead of Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 debut. For example, Nortel and Polycom announced the addition of HD Video and Telepresence to Unified Communications, and IBM made public promises of tighter levels of integration between its own UC platform and its new, free Lotus Symphony productivity suite. Still, I expected to hear something earth shattering as fall is typically the season when many big player analyst events occur.

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I have to say that I love the whole concept of Unified Communications, but, after wading through the flood of press and meetings during and post-VoiceCon I keep getting struck with thoughts on what is missing from UC. It is broadly applicable and complex, not the neat little bucket that unified messaging was when it was first talked about. In the early days of UM, our biggest worry was where were the voicemails, faxes and emails being stored? Not so with UC. We have layers of complexity that most companies haven’t begun to think about. Plus we have several industries if you separate data from telecom, which are pushing the concept of unifying communications for the betterment of business and mankind, not just one, so how do we get there from here? Here is where all the vendor hype is. There is made up of real deployments, with ROI, applications working seamlessly together, unhindered on well run and provisioned networks. The middle of here and there is where it gets scary.

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