Behind the discussions of innovation and enterprise-focus that permeated the keynotes and speeches here at the Alcatel-Lucent enterprise forum in Paris, the company demoted the SIP focus that will occupy much of is innovation this year.

While Alcatel-Lucent's OmniPCX offers SIP capabilities to date, neither contact center nor a unified communications environment are available for a pure SIP environment. Also lacking is support for a rich SIP client with business connectivity.

That's going to change. By the start of next year, Alcatel-Lucent will port the Genesys contact center onto a SIP server. A demonstration here at the show ran the Omnitouch Premium Edition application on the Genesys platform against a built in SIP server. Communication connecting to other SIP devices through SIP trunking.

Next month Alcatel-Lucent will rebrand its Eye-Box technology as the Extended Communications Server and add SIP support by the October of this year. Eye-Box is an open source platform that provides a Web interface into core communications functions such as mail, collaborative applcations, file transfer, and address book. It integrates with Outlook.

While Eye-Box has applications for the enterprise, the carrier market is probably it's real calling. The demonstrator here told me that France Telecom was extremely interested in the application as a way of improving it's customers' stickiness.

A new SIP client will connect mobile phones and soft-clients into the enterprise. Users will be able to place, transfer and perform all of their common business tasks from a Windows Mobile PC or an Internet connected PC.

ANALYSIS
What's less clear, however, is to how far Alcatel-Lucent will succeed in its SIP efforts. The OmniPCX's SIP offering is still very much a hybrid play nor are Alcatel-Lucent's voicemail systems built with SIP interfaces.

Perhaps what's most worrisome is Alcatel's ability to negotiate the interoperability issues that continue to plague SIP. As one Alcatel-Lucent employee put it to me, while there's consensus on core SIP functions there's no consensus on more advanced features, like firewall traversal or integration with Outlook. "Our SIP implementation, for example, won't work with Nokia's SIP implementation," he acknowledged.

All vendors playing in this market have a similar challenge, which is where alliances and market perception help vendors persuade third-parties to adopt their interpretation of the SIP specification. Alcatel-Lucent may face a bigger challenge than most leading players. I heard here on the floor that Attitude Telecom, for example, recently snubbed Alcatel-Lucent, and was not willing to invest the time to make its SIP implementation compatible with Alcatel-Lucent. That's doesn't bode well for the US market place where Alcatel-Lucent is even less dominant.