LOS ANGELES - Lucent on Tuesday unveiled a fresh attempt to push unified messaging, desktop videoconferencing and other multimedia-friendly applications into the enterprise.
Uncharacteristically for a legacy voice-equipment vendor, the new project, dubbed iCosm, is virtually a green-field approach to IP-based personal communications.
The iCosm suite of applications is designed largely for buyers of Lucent's IP Exchange Systems - the vendor's open-standards alternative to the classic Definity PBX. It features moderate prices and what Lucent hopes will prove to be broad scalability.
Introduced at the Computer Telephony Expo here, iCosm begins as a suite of four offerings that will be an alternative to Lucent's own Intuity Message Manager and other add-ons to Lucent's traditional PBXs and voice-response platforms.
The first iCosm product, called iCosm Interaction Manager, is a rules-based set of applications for what Lucent officials call "informal call centers" - that is, sets of employees responsible for customer relations who aren't grouped in a typical telephony 800 phone bank. Based on the Microsoft Outlook interface, Interaction Manager uses wizards and rules-based filtering technology to respond to customers regardless of medium - Web callback, text chat, e-mail or phone call.
The software - available now direct from Lucent and later in the year from authorized resellers - works on IP Exchange Systems and is also being developed to support certain Nortel phone switches. The list price is $450 to $800 per user for a five-person installation.
The second product is iCosm Collaborative Video, a client-only application that provides multipoint videoconferences over the Internet or IP virtual private networks without requiring a centralized conferencing server. It supports a wide range of bandwidth levels so that corporate managers who have the bandwidth available from carrier services or private nets can push picture quality higher than what has typically been available to desktop video. Collaborative Video costs $100 to $495 per desktop and supports up to 20 users per session, with others able to participate via audio only.
The third application, iCosm Liaison, is personal agent software that ties into users' contact databases, calendars and other productivity tools. Via a Web interface, individuals can set rules for forwarding calls received over IP Exchange Systems to other telephony devices, depending on calling party, time of day and other factors. Available in the second quarter, Liaison will be priced at $400 per user.
The fourth application, iCosm Messaging, is a unified-messaging overlay on Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Communicator that will be available in the second quarter from IP Exchange Systems resellers. It will also be available to service providers that have installed Lucent's Softswitch IP central-office platform and want to offer carrier-network-based unified messaging to end users. The system converts voice mails to .WAV files and faxes to .TIF files for an integrated presentation on Outlook or Communicator. The system also provides text-to-speech translation, including e-mail by phone. The initial price is expected to be $5,000 per system, plus $110 per seat.
Underlining Lucent's attempt to present iCosm as an enhanced offering for IP-centric voice buyers that is separate from its more traditional offerings, it has established a separate address for product information atwww.icosm.com, though that URL pops back to the iCosm information on Lucent's main Web site.
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