ALE Launches Rainbow Platform

ALE has announced the release of a new relationship management platform. The Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow is a cloud-based platform designed to connect business users, contacts, and systems, to enhance collaboration and productivity, and is currently available as a freemium offering.

The services available in Rainbow are implemented as an overlay solution, providing collaborative capabilities that users and companies can adopt and deploy no matter what their existing communications systems are. In the first release, Rainbow Essential, ALE is offering contact management, presence, instant messaging, audio/video calling, screen sharing, and file sharing, accessed from an app on desktops and smartphones.

Rainbow Essential's overlay provides a hybrid approach to Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and third party communication platforms, so as to let users protect their investments while accessing the services from Rainbow. As it is a Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS), Rainbow's open architecture can integrate with a number of third party applications and business processes, and ALE is creating open APIs for developers. Integrating Rainbow with existing communication systems will allow for capabilities such as telephony presence, call control, and telephony multi-site federation.

Notably, Rainbow Essential is available for free of charge to anyone who registers at www.openrainbow.com. Naturally, as a "freemium" service, users will have to pay to unlock certain features and services, but the core features will still be available to anyone who wants them. Future Rainbow platforms may not follow this trend, but it still lets Rainbow Essential serve as an introduction to anyone on the fence about it.

Later on, in 2017, ALE will introduce Premium Rainbow through the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Partner network. This will offer additional services to users and administrators, including multi-party conferencing, user management, and directory integration, in addition to more PBX integration services.

For more information, visit enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com.