Alcatel-Lucent Goes SIP Crazy

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.