Alcatel-Lucent has re-entered the enterprise market months after selling off its enterprise division.
The new cloud-based unified communications solution, developed in collaboration with CounterPath, will allow communications over most networks, devices and applications.
Called Alcatel-Lucent Rapport for Enterprise, it uses CounterPath’s Bria softphones and Stretto Platform to provide communication services to different parts of the organisation including office workers, remote workers, call centres and retail outlets.
The products will be distributed through Alcatel-Lucent’s to large enterprises in industries such as financial services, manufacturing and healthcare.
The move comes just over seven months after the enterprise division of Alcatel-Lucent was sold off to become Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Nokia is currently in the process of acquiring the company.
Fran Heeran, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Communications and Collaboration Business Unit noted, "Enterprises today are struggling with legacy communications infrastructures that are expensive to manage, run in silos, tied to specific vendors and stifle innovation.
"Rapport is a robust, scalable platform that shifts the focus to service innovation through an apps-first approach, allowing the rapid development and launch of new web-based services and mobile applications, while at the same time capping costly telecom network silo spending."
Heeran added: "This transforms enterprise communications into a valuable corporate asset that can be leveraged across all line-of-business applications."
"The quality, and reliability of CounterPath’s Enterprise communications technology is evidenced by the millions of deployments by the world’s largest OEMs, operators and enterprises over the last ten years," said Donovan Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of CounterPath.
Jones continued: "Today, however, Enterprises are facing new challenges and demands as employees increasingly seek realise that the user experience they have come to appreciate in their consumer apps is now available in the enterprise world, demand surges from all levels of the organisation.
"Alcatel-Lucent’s plans to resell our products are a testament to our market leadership. Through this new partnership, we are already establishing commercial relationships with large enterprises that may deploy our technology across their organisation to increase employee productivity and data security, while simplifying IT administration tasks by leveraging the advanced functionality of our Stretto Platform."
