Laszlo System announced on in a press release on Monday, that they signed an OEM agreement with Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) for their Laszlo Webtop product. Alcatel developed what may be one of the most advanced unified communication solutions with their Rich Communication Manager 5155, a web-based communication portal with superb user experience, built on the Laszlo Webtop product. The product has been called a Google-Voice killer, a platform that not only matches the converged communication features newly offered by the search giant but also allows telecom service providers to leverage their own unique advantages to one-up over-the-top (OTT) providers.Alcatel Lucent announced a first customer for the product in February 2009 naming Telefonica/O2 in the Czech Republic as a first customer.
Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager built with OpenLaszlo and Laszlo Webtop
Here’s what Intel has to say about the the product in a solution white paper:
A network-base “personal media vault” for photos, voice, video, e-mail, and attachments. As well as a network repository for MMS, SMS and IM chat. One Address Book, IMS-Enabled with presence information. A family of “Rich IP Universal Messaging Clients” for mobile devices and a complementary family of messaging clients for other elements of the quad play.
How Alcatel Lucent 5155 Rich Communications Manager fits into the communication landscape
I was a bit surprised to see a hardware-centric company like Alcatel Lucent come out with such an advanced communication solution. But then, Alcatel has been one of the leading companies providing advanced web-based solution with CTI functionality as early as 2001/2002.
“Laszlo’s Webtop platform has unique capabilities that allow us to deliver the convergence experience our customers are demanding, while also enabling them to incorporate their own rich Internet applications to provide service differentiation in the marketplace,” said Gani Nayak, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Communications.”
Ray Colbert of Alcatel Lucent has more to say on the product an the vision of Alcatel Lucent in this interesting interview on YouTube with bnetTV.com:
Ray Colbert – Director Technology and Innovation – on 5155 RCM at CTIA Wireless 2009
I like the idea the idea of a technology like the Rich Communications Manager making it easier for senior Internet users to catch up with the communication habits of their grandchildren, integrating Twitter and Facebook like communication with more standard communication channels like SMS, MMS and voice messaging. And using an Adobe AIR application as a tool to signal Webtop events to user is great. The first OpenLaszlo prototype I built with Markus Heimhuber in July 2004 was a modified Laszlo Dashboard running embedded in Java app that was running as a tray icon and would respond to messages received from a PBX through CTI integration. And I’m still thankful that Markus pointed me to Laszlo and the Laszlo Presentation Server back in early 2004.
It’s good to see that more and more global companies like IBM and Alcatel Lucent use either OpenLaszlo or Laszlo Webtop for building very advanced web-based solutions. It would be good to see those companies add value to the OpenLaszlo platform by committing bug fixes and features back to the open source product.
Update: I forgot to mention that Alcatel Lucent won the Andrew Seybold ChoiceAward in the category “Most Innovative Mobile Application”. Here’s what Andrew Seybold has to say about the product.
Alcatel-Lucent’s winning application, a converged IP messaging solution, is built on a standards-based platform-level solution that allows end-users previously limited to dedicated, purpose-built systems optimized individually for voice, video, text or email, to access all types of messaging regardless of location or device. The modular, scalable solution is based on new multi-core Intel architecture and it allows carriers to deliver new services without compromise.
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