What mobility has done is change the conversation. For the past 30 years, enterprise data communication was about the personal computer. But that’s shifting as smartphones and tablets have given the world the ability to more easily perform work from any device with a cellular and/or Wi-Fi connection. The cloud has then given business the ability to perform business with these devices, effectively taking enterprise computing resources and making them available to any employee with authorized access at any time.
The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend within the enterprise is the manifestation of this. And, IP-based communications of all types has also changed quite a bit driven by mobility and the cloud. Collaborative conversation is much easier, and video conferencing is easier than ever.
Helping to meet the needs of the new direction of business companies such as Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) have developed services that help enable this transformation of business.
Alcatel-Lucent’s OpenTouch solution, for instance, delivers a suite of business communications and collaboration applications sold as a service. It is designed to help communities of enterprise employees solve specific communications pain points in their day-to-day working lives.
“Delivered through the cloud, these single-purpose applications can be deployed as an overlay to any type of communication and network solution,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent application note, Alcatel-Lucent Opentouch Personal Cloud.
The OpenTouch personal cloud gives businesses a single turnkey solution that enables them to offer their employees many of the key applications that make business function in the mobile and cloud-based software age.
For instance, OpenTouch Conference is an easy conference call solution that avoids the traps that many conferencing solutions face, such as pins that can be forgotten or forgotten dial-up numbers.
The OpenTouch Video Store also is a part of the OpenTouch personal cloud that helps enterprise customers create what essentially amounts to private YouTube video communities. This can be useful for knowledge sharing within an organization, enabling employees to record and upload videos in a private setting that can then be leveraged by other employees.
As Alcatel-Lucent has cheekily coined, the world is now in the middle of a new PC era; it has gone from the personal computing era to the personal cloud era.
