New Alcatel-Lucent Suite to Assist Enterprise Migration to the Cloud

A suite of cloud-based communications solutions, OpenTouch Suite For Cloud, has been released by Alcatel-Lucent. It is aimed at assisting enterprises in their move to the cloud, and will also offer a better mobile support.

The vice president of business development for Alcatel-Lucent's OpenTouch products, Jack Jachner, stated that the same robust UC features as the on-premise version will be provided through the cloud-based edition of the suite, and multi-party conferencing, instant messaging, document sharing and support for mobile devices such as Apple's iPad, will also be provided. However, the additions will be offered in a cloud-based model, and users can pay as they go.

Jachner stated: "It's indistinguishable for the user whether [OpenTouch] is CPE-based or in the cloud, but we do provide a different business model. You don't have to buy it up front, but we can provide a pay-per-month, per-feature kind of model."

The OpenTouch Suite For Cloud is available in three varying flavours, and is available either wholly in the cloud, or as an additional layer to an existing CPE-based telephony infrastructure. The OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud is equal to the on-premise OpenTouch Suite for Mid-Sized and Large Enterprise (MLE).

Additional provisions include the OpenTouch Office Cloud, and this outlines the on-premise SMB version of the OpenTouch collaboration suite, and an overlay of collaboration services is provided through the OpenTouch Personal cloud, which runs regardless of the IP PBX a user has in place.

The news from Alcatel-Lucent follows the announcement of Avaya's UC-as-a-Service, and collaboration vendors like Cisco and ShoreTel have also taken to the cloud with their solutions. An enterprise practice lead at U.K.-based analyst firm Ovum, Evan Kirchheimer, states that this trend will echo among enterprise users.

Kirchheimer said: "While UCaaS remains in its infancy, there are a growing number of providers offering cloud UC solutions. We feel confident that enterprises can adopt UCaaS and know that there are a number of viable and robust solutions in the market that offer an affordable means to access advanced UC and collaboration tools."

The OpenTouch Suite Cloud will be hosted by Alcatel-Lucent partners like Irving, Texas-based Icon Voice Networks. According to Jachner, there will also be the chance for channel partners to resell the suite from these cloud service providers. (CY) Link