No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Changes the Conversation

Alcatel-Lucent acquired Genesys a while back, but only recently have the two groups created a closer organization, enabling them to work together in a more unified fashion. At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise analyst conference last week, the company introduced its new brand, which emphasizes one identity--ALU Enterprise--with three businesses: Genesys, Communications, and Network. Fortunately ALU recognized the importance of the Genesys name and reputation, and kept the Genesys name and logo as a brand for customer care and moving to UC and collaboration.

Opening the conference, Tom Burns, President, Enterprise & Strategic Industries, discussed ALU Enterprise’s strategy to "Change the Conversation" and help customers transform their communications to make every conversation relevant, meaningful, productive, and consistent throughout the enterprise and to customers. Burns noted that the goal and objective is to connect with customers and partners, and to engage with them and understand their business needs and requirements, and "with our passion and with our partners we will execute and change the conversation so every conversation is meaningful. We are ALU Enterprise--we want to be your partner."

This point was highlighted in a discussion I had with Tom that evening regarding his comment during his presentation that "UC is dead (pause) because we haven't been selling it properly." What he meant by this comment is that vendors can't just go out and try to sell unified communications without understanding the customer’s business, business needs, and goals. This is something that the UCStrategies team has advocated since the early days of UC--it's not about the technologies, it's about how UC can help companies meet their business goals by streamlining communications and eliminating delays and inefficiencies. The first step is talking to the customer about their business, which is what "Change the Conversation" is all about--having conversation with customers about how their communications can be changed to help them meet their objectives. While I don't agree that UC is dead, I do agree with Tom that, "UC, when relevant to the customer, is an outstanding experience. But we need to have a discussion with customers about it."

With the Change the Conversation approach, ALU wants to let its Genesys contact center customers know that ALU can bring more to the table and help them connect and engage. The idea is to find out what are the customer issues and how more of the ALU portfolio can help customers. It's not just about contact center products or a PBX, and by changing the conversation, ALU hopes to have more cross-sell opportunities between Genesys and traditional ALU products. Burns noted that several customers have already moved in this direction, including Kaplan, Entel, Barclays, and Shangri-La.

At the conference we heard from three customers--all using ALU Enterprise technologies and solutions in innovative ways. You can view my video podcast with Elizabeth Gotto of Ticketmaster at www.ucstrategies.com. Ticketmaster has been a Genesys customer, and launched its CIM platform for intelligent call routing, as well as Genesys SIP Server so that they are full IP from when the call hits their network through to agent delivery--with no hardware on the agent desktop. Ticketmaster is the largest Genesys SIP Server implementation in North America.

Other customers were Reece & Nichols, the largest real estate company in Kansas City, which implemented some of ALU's unified communications capabilities, including unified messaging for delivery of voicemails to users' corporate email, find me/follow, and hotelling capabilities. The company found that after moving to ALU's software-based VoIP infrastructure and by switching to VoIP capabilities at just eight of its 21 locations, its ongoing maintenance costs and vendor costs went down from $172K to $56K in three years.

Rather than write about the third customer presentation, Groupama, a major European insurance and banking company, I’ll point you to their fabulous video. As Phillipe Vayssac of Groupama noted, "IVR Voice is dead--IVR Visual is born." Once you see the video, you'll understand.

A new brand, new products (which I didn't even get into here), and a new approach to working with customers--Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise appears to be on the right track. Now we have to see how its sales teams, channel partners, and customers take to the "Change the Conversation" approach.