In my last NoJitter blog I interviewed several blind men who ran their fingers across Alcatel-Lucent's shiny new architecture for its communications and contact center products. In the weeks since then I realized there was a blind man who never got to have his say. This is the guy who notes that the new, still unnamed architecture can be deployed not just in the enterprise but by carriers as the basis of their hosted services.
By way of refresher, the new architecture incorporates Alcatel-Lucent's widely-deployed enterprise IP PBX, elements of the Genesys contact center platform, and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology that Alcatel-Lucent sells primarily to service providers. The idea--or at least part of it--is to allow enterprises, service providers, and contact center operators to deploy a common set of related and fully interoperable communications, collaboration and customer support applications and services.
Along this line, Paul Segre, president of Alcatel-Lucent's Applications Software Group, said he anticipates the new architecture to change the way his company's products are sold through service providers. Rather than simply reselling PBXs to enterprises and SMBs, carriers would deploy the new architecture internally and make elements of it available to their customers. Enterprises would likewise deploy the new architecture, which, according to Eric Penisson, general manager of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Applications, would help drive delivery of hybrid cloud solutions since the architecture would be deployed in both public and private networks.
Among the UC solution developers out there, Alcatel-Lucent is very well positioned to deliver on a product architecture with so broad a scope. This is in part because so many of its competitors in the service provider infrastructure industry made strategic decisions to divorce themselves of their enterprise groups. Siemens and Ericsson fall squarely into this category, having sold their enterprise businesses to private equity on the one hand and Aastra Technologies on the other. Avaya was also on the receiving end of such a divestiture when Lucent Technologies spun it off...only to be merged--irony of ironies--with a company with a strong enterprise business.
As a result there are few developers with portfolios broad enough to develop a product architecture relevant to enterprises and service providers alike. Cisco, it can be argued, is among the few that can. But as far as I know it hasn't. I mean, Cisco has a communications-centric platform on which carriers can build hosted services (Hosted UC System). And it has a newer, more collaboration- and apps-centric platform (Hosted Collaboration Solution) also for service providers. Both incorporate the UC and collaboration technology at the heart of Cisco's enterprise platforms, but they nonetheless fall short of sort of the comprehensive architecture Alcatel-Lucent is proposing.
Alcatel-Lucent, however, is by no means the first company to propose a common technology foundation for both carriers' and enterprises' communications needs. Before the industry was abuzz about public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds to bridge them...before SIP rose to prominence...before Siemens AG spun off its enterprise division...there was LifeWorks. Described as a concept or vision rather than a technology or architecture, LifeWorks was Siemens' proposal to deliver a "unified domain" that would eliminate the boundaries between voice, data, public, private, fixed line, and mobile communications.
As with the still unnamed Alcatel-Lucent architecture, LifeWorks was made up of communications systems deployed by service providers and the enterprise PBXs and applications deployed by businesses. As with the Alcatel-Lucent architecture, the goal was to deliver a consistent communications experience for end users regardless of whether they were connected to enterprise or service provider communications resources. And as with the Alcatel-Lucent architecture, LifeWorks was accompanied by organizational changes that were supposed let the company leverage previously separate business groups, namely Siemens IC Mobile and Siemens IC Networks.
However LifeWorks and its unified domain concept never managed to catch on. This was at least in part because coordinating technology adoption among enterprises and service providers proved next to impossible. Alcatel-Lucent will face similar challenges once it delivers and starts promoting its new architecture to enterprises and carriers alike.
