Alcatel-Lucent announced a suite of enhancements late last month for its large enterprise portfolio. The move furthers the company's enterprise strategy announced nearly two years ago. Tom Burns, head of Alcatel-Lucent enterprise activities said: "Alcatel-Lucent has added more than 5,000 new enterprise customers since the initial launch of the Corporate Communications Solutions offering."

The new Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise 9.0 release, which supports up to 100,000 users, improves the system’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) controller and SIP trunking and is designed to interoperate directly with any vendor’s standards-based SIP endpoint directly including both Alcatel-Lucent or third-party devices.

Other enhancements add support for RIM BlackBerry devices, adding to the company’s existing support for Windows Mobile and Nokia E-series Symbian devices. Mobile client features provide connectivity to Alcatel-Lucent’s telephony and audio conferencing services, while multimedia, multi-session collaboration, and mobile device integration are also supported for third-party applications including the Microsoft Office Communicator, the IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime Connect version 8.0 clients; a new DECT handset is also now available to reduce mobility costs in industrial environments.

In other news, AT&T has published a second whitepaper on enterprise network security which our readers will find very useful. The paper, “Securing the Converged Enterprise, Part 2: Network Defense-in-Depth Architectural Considerations”, discusses additional security risks encountered with converged networks. The analysis concludes that the key is to institute safeguards at critical network junctures, such as where the WAN meets the LAN, where the wireless LAN meets the wired LAN, between server farms and in endpoint devices. This paper discusses how to implement this type of network to guard against network intrusions by internal employees and Internet users alike.

The first AT&T whitepaper in the series, “Securing the Converged Enterprise, Part 1: The Risk Implications of Unified Networks, Applications and Protocols”, discusses how IT departments must balance the benefits of convergence and the associated new security risks with defenses like centralized security policy management and “layered” security; it delineates the risks associated with convergence and discusses best practices for mitigating them.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.