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!!