* Alcatel reveals voice upgrades
While at VoiceCon last week, we had the chance to chat with Alcatel, which has been racking up some pretty impressive wins with its OmniPCX among large businesses. The company announced several upgrades to its portfolio that we believe will make it even more competitive.
First, Alcatel announced it will port its PBX software from Unix to Linux. Second, the company is making its software “portable,” so it can be placed on another vendor’s hardware platform as needed for applications integration. Third, it is providing full support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). And fourth, Alcatel is providing support for XML.
These moves bring several advantages. By supporting SIP, XML, and a hardware-independent software architecture, Alcatel opens the door further for its 120 ecosystem partners to hasten application development. Alcatel promised more information on these applications in a few months, including their expanded capabilities for integrating IT-based business process data flows between an enterprise back office and communications systems.
Alcatel also should be able to achieve better costs per station. With hardware independence, its PBX applications can now share server space with other applications.
These changes also bring about the capability for a distributed architecture so branch locations can share applications with a home office location, further decreasing cost and improving reliability.
Alcatel has changed the pricing structure so that user costs are no longer dependent on a fixed hardware price; rather, the station costs are independent of the serving hardware’s location. This increases flexibility and decreases costs for user moves and changes.
We’re pleased to see that a traditional PBX vendor is aware that voice over IP isn’t just about toll bypass, and that Alcatel is positioning itself for the next trend in convergence – rapid and customized development of user applications.
