During the forum, some of us had the opportunity to hear from some Genesys customers who participated in the Genesys Customer Innovation Awards. I was pleased to see that several of these customers implemented solutions that go beyond the contact center to the enterprise, such as routing calls to expert agents outside of the contact center, as well as implementing Genesys' OpenMedia and Business Process Routing. Clearly, the idea of expanding contact center capabilities throughout the enterprise and to non-voice calls is taking hold.
Much of my time was spent viewing demos and attending a range of sessions, including several on unified communications. The theme throughout several of these sessions and demos is that ALU offers a choice of UC approaches and clients for customers in order to work in different telephony and desktop environments.
Taking its previous separate clients and integrating them together in a federated client, ALU offers My Instant Communicator. 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. My Instant Communicator runs in the tray on the user's PC and pops up when needed. Toast windows are used for managing incoming communications, with several different types of toasts being available, such as for managing an incoming call or IM, joining a conference, or notification of contacts' availability. 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.
For customers with IBM Sametime, ALU offers OmniTouch My Teamwork for IBM Lotus Sametime. This plugin ties in Lotus Sametime's instant messaging, presence services, and web conferencing capabilities with ALU's OmniTouch My Teamwork audio conferencing and collaboration product. The OmniTouch My Teamwork for Lotus Sametime 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. Users can click-to-conference, start an instant group call with a single click, etc. from a contact window. In addition, My Instant Communicator supports both Lotus Notes and Sametime.
ALU also integrates its OmniPCX Enterprise switch (OXE for short) via its Genesys subsidiary's GETS (Genesys Enterprise Telephony Software). GETS integrates with a large number of different IP, TDM, and hybrid PBXs, and will be integrated into the next release of OmniPBX Enterprise. GETS is used for integrating the OXE switch, as well as third-party switches with Microsoft LCS/OCS.
Depending on the customers' environment, they can choose from the various clients and approaches to UC. ALU also offers user profiles to identify five types of UC users. After identifying whether the user is an executive, mobile worker, on-site roamer, office worker or team worker, ALU then provides a bundled UC offering including an appropriate phone device, telephony capabilities and advanced applications, in order to match the individual user's specific communication needs for their job function.
ALU clearly has shown some thought leadership in the way in which it approaches unified communications. Maybe all that great French wine helps!
