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.

In August I blogged about Voxeo’s self-service and contact center capabilities, and on their acquisition of SIP-provider, Micromethod Technologies. At the time I made the case that due to some of the capabilities that this acquisition would bring, that it wouldn’t be long until Voxeo came out with a UC story of its own, seeing as it now had so many of the pieces to do so. I won’t reiterate all the details as you can read the blog by going to the August archives on the No Jitter site.

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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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It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

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On the seventh day of UC the industry gave to me 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.
This is all about going green. How could anyone that reads a paper or goes onto the Internet not see the issue of green initiatives as a hot topic? My day seven wish is the second, along with assistive technology, that is about companies doing more to promote what they have or are doing. Day seven is that companies talk more about their green initiatives because we don’t hear enough about them. If we don’t hear about it, then customers don’t hear about it, and in order to go green customers need to be able to make intelligent choices when choosing vendors. In fact, Siemens recently held a webinar, entitled “The Green Contact Center – Making “Green” Work for you”. In it they held a poll with the question “Do you believe that a significant number of customers would be positively inclined to buy from vendors who publicly demonstrate a commitment to the Green initiatives?” Approximately 95% responded yes. Therefore, day seven is a wish to hear about green.

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