I just returned from 2 good days in Barcelona at the IMS World Forum event.  Those few people who read my blogs will know already that Anana was invited to attend a breakout ’round-table’ event at the Forum with Alcatel-Lucent, with a view to exploring in an open debate the state of play in the IP Multimedia-Subsystem (IMS) across the global Service Provider and Carrier Markets.

Alcatel-Lucent is a huge player in IMS, and attracted very strong attendance from some of the major Tier 1 operators around the World.  Anana’s remit was to represent the Application Developer, who uses Application Programming Interfaces (API) or External Interface Specifications (EIS) inherent in Alcatel-Lucents Carrier Applications Portfolio.  We were all challenged in active debate for a good couple of hours by Yankee Group Vice President, Brian Partridge to address key themes across Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) migration via NGN core to IMS, and then into more explosive discussion around RCS (Rich Communications Services) and the new GSM ratified RCS-e (Enhanced) capabilities.

We finished around Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) and on many occasions the panel turned its attention to Paul (Pearson, Anana Platform Practice Lead) and I representing the Application developer for our views and observations.  We were tackled around many themes, including High Definition Audio, Voice Services, Applications Development, Video Services and Rapid Applications Development.

I know that I pushed the envelope on at least a couple of occasions around the theme of “Trust your Developer, No? Trust your API, Yes?!

My main arguments were around the terribly long execution cycles in Carriers to take idea’s from an idea to a live service.  Even if really aggressive we typically tackle projects spanning 18 months or more to deliver even basic applications of moderate complexity in the core network.  Modern markets require cycles of innovation 10 times shorter than this in order that the Carrier remain nimble enough to tap revenue from the current ‘theme’.  I used simple examples like Viral broadcasting, like “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” or “American Idol” to indicate that these phenomenon attract huge public attention for periods to be measured in weeks.  If the Carrier cannot innovate with Enhanced Services that tap the ‘public interest’ at the time they are active then of course the Public’s attention is drawn immediately to the Web2.0 channel where Applications are available on the CLIENTS (Handsets) within days of the ‘interest starting’.

My second line of argument was around “Trust”.  If a vendor like Alcatel-Lucent opens the ‘hood’ on a vertical platform capability, say for example, the heart of their IMS solution, then the Carrier should explore the VALIDATION and TRUST certfication of the API; knowing and trusting that 3rd party application developers for the Core, like Anana, be allowed to explore the API capability set without going through months of regression and inter-operability test on the resulting ‘innovation’.  This theme sparked good interest and dialogue.  The API in turn, must be open enough to afford the functionality required, but at the same time, not expose the underlying core to threat.  It is a fine line, I agree, but one that I think Alcatel-Lucent and its Carrier Customers can find by working together in collaborative exploration.  This really is about a market of “Applications Enablement” on High Leveraged Networks!  Alcatel-Lucent has got their message and activities SPOT ON!

Of course, it is humbling for us to be invited by a Global Giant like Alcatel-Lucent to support them at these forms of key events.  I hope and trust that Anana did not let anyone down or downplay the relevance of Carriers challenges to keep up with Over the Top revenue haemorrages!  The positive feedback on the round-table was strong enough for me to feel surity that we acted in accordance with the needs and expectations of the carriers at the meeting.  It was nice to get a note from Brian at Yankee Group the next day indicating that the sessions on the Application Developer view of the IMS core was probably one of the most interesting of the entire event.  Thanks Brian!

We did get the chance to demonstrate some of our Carrier Applications Innovations; including the Social-Media aware Voice Messaging mash-up we created with Alcatel-Lucent.  Every Carrier we showed it to wanted to learn more!  Standing by of course for follow-up!

Special quick note of thanks to Sandip Mukerjee, President of the Alcatel-Lucent IMS Solutions for the invitation to support his team, and of course the excellent company for Paul and I throughout the subsequent evening.

We had the pleasure of hosting a large scale demonstration and briefing of the Genesys 8 Customer Interaction Management Platform to approximately 35 delegates yesterday. A very hectic, busy, noisy and fun day indeed.  The briefing featured a full review of;

• Genesys Inbound Voice on SIP Server with IP endpoints
• Skills Group – Customer Care, Sales, Accounts & Billing and Customer Support CSR skill teams
• Genesys chat – live customer service Chat Interaction Management (Genesys Web Chat)
• Genesys Agent to Agent instant messaging (IM)
• Genesys Email Interaction

We had intended to demonstrate a range of contact centre scenario’s, but by the time we’d described how a call is placed into the call centre with all of the interactions between the SIP Server, Universal Routing Server (URS), Statistics Server (Stat Server) and the new Genesys Media Server (Stream Manager replacement) to do something simple like play an announcment which is time sensitive, e.g. Good Morning, Good Afternoon etc, we found the briefing taking its own direction; driven by active and engaged interaction with our client who immediately bombarded our team with hundreds of questions, immediately trying out what had just been learned and explored.

It was powerfully effectve to show and explore how Genesys CCPulse, Stat-Server, Infomart and Genesys Advisor alongside statistics and performance tools inherent to the Genesys Agent Desktop (GAD) and Interaction Workspace all worked together to provide a total and complete view of operational performance.  Especially impressive was making changes to routing, skills and queues (applications) in real-time and observing the impact immediately on how the call centre performed.

I think the client especially enjoyed seeing the ultimate change in the modern call centre.  They are, after all, typically associated with the engaged and deliberate management of inbound telephone calls and outbound telephone calls.  What is newer, is embracing any media or any inbound channel with the vehemence and rigour of telephones; but now applied to instant messaging, email, web-chat and voice, not as conversations, but as interactions!  It suddenly became clear to most why Genesys calls this the “Customer Interaction Management Platform” because it is all about managing Interactions; not just telephone conversations!

We also had a breakout discovering Alcatel-Lucent Unified Communications Suite, MyTeamwork and the brand new IC Phone!  Very cool stuff!

Anana and Alcatel-Lucent Team for “Applications Enablement” and the “High Leverage Network”

For the last year or so Anana has been actively exploring the theme of “Applications Enablement” within our partnership with Alcatel-Lucent.  We have been very busy already in creating new applications and capabilities by mixing technologies across the Alcatel-Lucent portfolio with Anana innovation; creating new products and solutions on the way.  For example;

Social-Media enabled Voice Messaging – its4u
A marriage of the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Messaging System (CMS), the 5100, Messaging Applications Broker (MAB), the 5150, Genesys Voice Platform (Alcatel-Lucent Enteprise) and Anana Speech Applications Framework.  The result; a cool new voice-user experience for voice-messaging and voice-mail! (See here for more details)

Generic Voice Messaging Applications Solutions
In the process of exploring Voice User Interfaces and Graphical User Interfaces for Unified Communications in voice messaging we also received many invitations to team with Alcatel-Lucent and its Carrier Teams to enhance existing Voice Messaging experiences in many markets around the world.  Some of the other mashup’s we’ve conducted here include the linking of the Anana Speech Application Framework, with Web Services and the Alcatel-Lucent Subscriber Data Manager (SDM), the 8650 and the Data Grid Suite (8660 and 8661).  This unifies the management and exposure of messaging applications, subscribers, profiles, OSS, and Unified Comms through Subscriber Data Manager.  Why is this so cool?  Well, for a start, it provides the Carrier with the most flexible and innovative voice mail solution; whilst at the same time making the application, features and capabilities available to any 3rd party application developer! This is “Applications Enablement” in Action!

4G-LTE HD VideoIVR and VisualIVR
Anana worked with Alcatel-Lucent to marry the capabilities of the Genesys Voice Platform (the worlds best IVR platform, don’t believe me, believe Garnter, who cite it recently for the 7th year running as the best IVR platform in the world!) with 4G-LTE. Anana created a high definition VideoIVR application which Alcatel-Lucent 4G teams use in “Innovations Days”, demonstrations, and Trials.  An example of one of these applications is available on our main website here if you’d like to see it!!

Alcatel-Lucent IMS Applications Enablement
Anana has been exploring “Applications Enablement” with a broad-exploration of themes to express Anana Applications Framework alongside the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Telephony Server (CTS – 5420) and its range of SDK’s and API’s.  These SDK’s and API’s have proven themselves extremely interesting in allowing a huge range of fantastic “Applications” and “Capabilities” on the IP Multimedia Subsystem network.  Anana worked for several weeks with Alcatel-Lucents IMS Ecosystem team to whittle down 24 applications innovation idea’s into a range of 7 ENHANCED SERVICES applications that really light-up the IMS core under the theme of “Unified Communications” ; all applications idea’s we created together bring together the capability set of Alcatel-Lucents IMS in a BOX capability with a rich Voice User Experience, a very broad Graphical User Experience whilst totally unified to the “Telephony User Interface”.  In other words; GUI+VUI+TUI=Killer Apps!

Back to the theme of this post!  As a result of these activities Anana just received a formal invitation to support Alcatel-Lucent at an IMS Customer Roundtable at the IMS World Forum, Barcelona in April.  Anana is one of of a small select group of Applications Enablement Partners that have been invited by the ALU IMS Ecosystem team to assist in stimulating discussion and debate on the “role for IMS beyond initial fixed broadband voice deployments”.  I bet you are dying to know what the 7 key application templates are that Anana is working with Alcatel-Lucent on!  I’ll tell you later on when the entire momentum of our IMS activities become less “sensitive”!!  A hint of an example is;  Unifying Enterprise Collaboration Software such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook/Collaboration with the IMS core and Speech Recognition for application capabilities like “Click to Call from a contact in a local address book – click on the contact in the email or the contacts and your phone will start ringing, when you answer the network has dialled the target number for you with other cool features like ‘instant easy conferencing with or without video” …… [Thats just one of the minor features of the Anana Application Framework and I'm not going to tell you anymore at the moment!!]

Summary
Applications Enablement and the High Leverage Network are real!  I spent a couple of years whilst working at Alcatel-Lucent across the Applications Software Group (ASG) and the Enterprise Division (with Genesys and Motive) on marrying together idea’s, concepts and capabilities with Alcatel-Lucents rich portfolio of solutions. I really enjoyed doing that!  I’m having even more fun now doing it on the Partner side of the equation.  Stop talking about what can be done; and just GO DO IT!!

We find ourselves already in early March; but we’ve got excellent progress to report on the Anana Briefing Centre.  Software deployment is now complete for all the functional building blocks, across inbound voice, email, chat and instant messaging (Genesys eServices) on the new Genesys Interaction Workspace.  Desktops have been temporarily themed whilst we wait for our graphics teams to complete the 4 sets of themes.

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Server count is now up to 28 machines.  Received our internal specification from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise teams for our OmniPCX Enterprise PBX platform; which, yes, will be integrated via SRI into Genesys 8 Framework.  Looking forward to playing with Alcatel-Lucents MyTeamwork, Unified Communications, Genesys Telecommunications Labs integration, the 4068 Bluetooth IP phones and so much more!

Interactive Insights, Genesys Advisor and other toys going in now.

Briefing Centre has already been earning its keep having enjoyed a pivotal role in several customer and partner engagements in the last few days. By far the view of those seeing the centre in action is “WOW”!!!

A fair amount of our recent activity within our partnership with Alcatel-Lucent has been around the social-media enabled voice messaging solution – its4u ; featured in detail here at the main Anana website. This application has already received a lot of independant press; in SpeechTek Magazine and on TMCnet publication “Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine” and always receives a warm acknowledgement from people that call my phone and hear it for the first time. Often the best responses come from ‘strangers’ who are unfamiliar with what we do here at Anana who are ‘bowled away and surprised’ by the new user experience.  I have a great collection of ‘surprise’ recordings in my voice messages; one day I should collate them and glue them all together as an ‘inspiration clip’!

The more that we have played with ‘innovation’ in the voice user interface and experience for voice messaging and voice-mail the more we have realized that the main excitement around the its4u interface is the fact that it is simply ‘different’.  Not only is it cool because it sounds completely different, but it is accompanied by a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that brings voicemail alive for the mailbox owner!  The multimedia integration of messaging, with message-store, and email, mp3 attachments of recordings, and the ability to retrieve voice messages with a GUI, as well as a Telephony User Interface (TUI) and having it embedded within email brings it all together.  I’m not arguing that the giants in this industry don’t have these capacities in their Tier1 voice-messaging solutions portfolio.  For some reason they have found it hard to get their clients (the Carriers) to embrace change and innovation in the interface.  Perhaps with its4u that changes the mindset a little.  We’ve certainly had lots of support from our partners at Alcatel-Lucent with our voice-messaging idea’s.

What do you think?  Is it the GUI that changes the game?  Is it the change in the voice user experience as a caller dialing in to someone and hitting the its4u service?  Try it yourself and see what you think!  Leave me a comment on this blog letting us know what you think?

Phone +44 1454 258069 to hear it in action.  After you’v called it please have a look at the pictures below; which show the experience the mailbox owner receives at the other end of your message deposit!

If you cannot phone the demo-line then please click here for an audio clip – its4u social media enabled voice messaging

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Leave your comments! We are really keen to hear and see your feedback.  Better still, phone it, try it, and leave a message!

Systems Components;

• Anana Speech and Web Services Application Framework
• Genesys Telecommunications Labs Voice Platform (Genesys Voice Platform 8.1), VoiceXML2.1
• Alcatel-Lucent Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker (MAB)
• Nuance Speech Recognition System, ASR (MRCP)
• Ivona Text to Speech (TTS) (MRCP)
• and a fair bit of innovation, mash-up and discovery!

In the meantime we continue to explore the “Applications Enablement” and “High Leverage Network” activities and partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys Labs (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise).  This mash-up is nice because it crosses all these paradigms in one go!