Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise makes the cloud personal with new applications-as-a-service solution

The Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) Enterprise division is today introducing a suite of business communications and collaboration applications delivered as a service (AaaS) for individual employees, complete teams or departments of any size, allowing businesses to harness the potential of the cloud for themselves and their customers.

As applications transcend daily life in the workplace – presenting new challenges to corporate IT departments in the process – cloud technology is increasingly becoming viable for delivering these applications. This is prompting businesses to find new models for connecting their employees anywhere and anytime on any device.

For a growing number of enterprise employees, their digital lives are no longer confined to a single device, nor defined by how and by what means content is delivered. This freedom creates exciting new opportunities. Offered as a cloud-hosted overlay, the OpenTouch Personal Cloud (OTPC) enables enterprise end users to select the communications solutions that best fit their needs. Businesses are able to deploy these solutions without experiencing an outage in existing services, plus there are no up-front costs nor new technology to install. Delivered through Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise channel business partners, OTPC offers businesses a collection of applications, on an as needed, per-users basis. They are designed to help user communities solve particular communication pain points in their day-to-day working lives.

All OTPC applications are accesible via web browsers on PCs or Apple’s Mac OS^®, and also via dedicated apps on smartphones and tablets. The initial three applications available in 2014 via OTPC include:

• OpenTouch Conference – OpenTouch Conference (OTCF) goes beyond traditional audio conferencing and web meetings. It enables enterprise users to join faster, easily control the meeting, and share with-a-click via the cloud on any device. Working with technology partner LoopUp, and its popular conferencing and meeting management product, OpenTouch Conference is an as-a-service, business professional, high quality conferencing tool.
• OpenTouch Video Store – Capitalizing on the power of video, OpenTouch Video Store (OTVS) enables employees to create and securely share video content as an effective communications tool to learn, improve productivity, create awareness and enhance interactions amongst employees. Available to external and internal contacts, OTVS helps contain costs and gives each employee the ability to create, access and share knowledge and information. OTVS is also ideal for education, technical support and to foster innovation across the enterprise.
• OpenTouch Team Share – The growing amount of data and documents available is driving the need for enterprises to find tools that enable file sharing and sync, project management, and team collaboration via the cloud. OpenTouch Team Share (OTTS) offers an enterprise-grade, cloud-based file sharing tool that also enables project teams to share, control and follow up on existing projects efficiently by gaining access to the information anytime, from any device.

OTPC solution also offers a dedicated website called Personal Cloud Space a revolutionary web-based cockpit where business partners and customers perform administration on their accounts. Through the Personal Cloud Space, designated customer administrators can create new user accounts for employees, change user settings and modify the options users have access to, as well as terminate users. Administrators also have access to company’s application consumption, and can view who’s using which service, predict the costs and take the actions to stay on budget. In all these ways, the Personal Cloud Space empowers customers to monitor the usage of their personal cloud applications.

The benefits of the OpenTouch Personal Cloud Solution reach across the enterprise:

• Employees and teams are able to address communications needs by selecting applications that meet business requirements with minimum IT involvement.

• IT departments deliver services to user communities from a range of pre-approved communications applications deployed as an overlay on any existing system, that doesn’t require capital investment or training and does not disrupt other services.
• CIOs and CFOs appreciate that the Personal Cloud applications can be delivered on existing communications infrastructure, protecting cash flow, exceptional cost predictability and pay-as-you-go options, and shifting CAPEX to OPEX.

The OpenTouch Personal Cloud offer will be made available globally starting with a group of early adopter business partners in Australia, France, Germany, Spain, UK and the United States.

Quotes

José Antonio Illarregui, General Manager BC Sistemas (Spain), “We see many of our customers looking for affordable ways to do more with technology in their business, avoiding long installation processes or changing infrastructures. Applications like the ones in Alcatel-Lucent’s OpenTouch Personal Cloud bring that opportunity with a real differentiated approach such the overlay and ‘as a service’ concepts. It’s an ideal way for us, as channel partners, to step into the cloud business with no risk or major investment.”

Dany Jennevé, VP, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Personal Cloud Solutions, “The vision of the OpenTouch Personal Cloud is to provide any organization with affordable, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade communications solutions as a service. As more businesses recognize the potential in supporting employees’ personal use of cloud applications, Alcatel-Lucent and its partners are there to give businesses the ability to shift to the cloud, with no hassle and minimal risk.”

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