Google’s continuing effort to enter new business fields, buying up innovative companies has lead to the launch of the Google Voice service in March 2009. Google Voice is based on the original GrandCentral service, a company that was acquired by Google in 2007. Google hasn’t really done much with GrandCentral in the past 2 years, at least there was not much visible activity. But now it seems like the company is massively entering the field of unified communication solutions. Google heavily invests in building up a global, digital communication infrastructure. That includes voice services as well as concepts for new ways of unified communication, based on the Google Wave Federation Protocol.
Google Voice has retained many of GrandCentral’s features, with several additions.
- A single Google number for all user’s phones.
- Free calls and SMS in the contiguous US.
- Calling International phone numbers for as low as 0.01 USD per minute.
- Call screening. Announce callers based on their number or by an automated identification request for blocked numbers..
- Listen in on someone recording a voicemail before taking a call.
- Block calls.
- Send, receive, and store SMS online.
- Answer an incoming call on any of your phones.
- Phone routing. Particular phones can ring based on who calls.
- Forwarding phones.
- Voicemail transcripts. Read voicemails online.
- Listen to voicemail online or from a phone.
- Receive notifications of voicemails via email or SMS.
- Personalized greeting that vary greetings by caller.
- The ability to forward or download voicemails.
- Conference calling.
- Record calls and store them online.
- Switch phones during a call.
- View the web inbox from a mobile device/phone.
- Set preferences for contacts by group.
- Ability to change your number for a fee.
If Google is determined to establish the service world-wide, they instantly become a competitor of telcos for the interesting group of mobile professionals. But currently Google Voice still forces you to add at least one new phone number to your portfolio: the Google Voice phone number. As a workaround you could combine Skydeck – another startup in the unified communications field – service with Google Voice. Skydeck lets you use your cell phone number as central point of communication, and integrates with the Google Voice service.
Are the telcos just going to stand by and watch Google create another successful service? What options do I have as a telco, if I want to offer a similar service and time-to-market is critical – facing the danger that a large number of existing mobile customers start using the Google Voice service?
Around the same time of the Google Voice service offering announcement, Alcatel-Lucent introduced a new unified communications solution: The Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) 5155 Rich Communications Manager (here is more information on the product in a previous blog post).
Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager built with Laszlo Webtop
Gani Nayak, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Communications business, described the Rich Communications Manager as follows:
“The Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager gives service providers a platform that helps them maximize the reliability, quality of service, identity management and trusted relationship they already provide to customers. By helping our customers unify their voice communications across multiple devices and networks — eventually integrating Web 2.0 services — Rich Communications Manager gives service providers the tools to fundamentally improve and simplify how we communicate by integrating different services in a single portal.”
Alcatel-Lucent built the RCM 5155 with Laszlo Webtop, a powerful portal solution including an SDK for building next-generation unified communication solutions. The power of the Laszlo Webtop lies within the fact that any Alcatel-Lucent customer can add their own custom-built applications running in their own window with the RCM. Any visual object can be made a SmartObject: SmartObjects add drag & drop communication to RCM. That means, if I built my custom application – depending on a contact from the address book – I can make my application respond to the drop event of a contact SmartObject into my application window. Any Webtop/RCM application can interact with other 3rd party applications through this mechanism. The underlying Webtop with the available APIs/components ensures that the UI will conform to the brand skinning or CI, delivering a state-of-the art user experience based on the concept of a Cinematic User Experience.
Alcatel-Lucent 5155 RCM provides centralized uniform access to messages
TMCnet did an interview with Ray Colbert, Alcatel-Lucent’s director of Rich Communication marketing strategy, on the Rich Communications Manager earlier this year. Here is an excerpt from the interview, with interesting information on the ideas behind the product:
TMCnet: One way that next-gen UC offerings distinguish themselves is by being relatively easy for subscribers to understand and use. What kinds of concepts did Alcatel-Lucent focus on when developing the Rich Communications Manager? What makes this product unique, from a subscriber’s point of view?
Ray Colbert: End users will appreciate the Rich Communications Manager’s familiar desktop paradigm, which makes it simple and intuitive to use. It leverages common desktop concepts, such as windows, sizing arrows, navigation bars and drag and drop capability. Therefore, end users can, for example, contact information – mobile number, e-mail address or v-card – in a Network Address Book can be dragged and dropped into another application. By extending mobile services, such as SMS, MMS, buddy lists and voice mail to the Web, wireless subscribers can also use the larger screen and keyboard to keep in touch with their mobile service from work and home.
TMCnet: Finally, talk to us about the ways that the 5155 Rich Communications Manager leverages open source technologies. Does Alcatel-Lucent envision service providers introducing new services that combine messaging with social networking, advertising and Web-based voice, presence and chat communications?
Ray Colbert: Alcatel-Lucent’s Applications Enablement strategy focuses on leveraging open platforms to enable the blending of traditional mobile and Web 2.0 services, as well as their rapid introduction. The Rich Communications Manager is built on such an open platform to allow modules and widgets to be easily added by Alcatel-Lucent, service providers or third parties.
Alcatel-Lucent is planning to release social networking, multimedia albums, videoshare modules in the future. Likewise, the open platform also allows service providers and third party developers to rapidly bring to market new applications tailored to their target customers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
I have the feeling that the Alcatel-Lucent offering is going to be a tough competitor for Google Voice. Google, not depending on charging customers for every message or minute in the same way the telcos have to, can afford to offer a large share of their services for free. But people have been complaining about the quality-of-service for Google Voice, and if there is a serious breakdown in Internet connectity, the whole Google Voice service collapses. Telcos on the other hand have much more experience in delivering fail-safe communication services on a global scale, although the telcos are struggling with other problems:
- Tough competition between companies, with more and more mobile apps offering communication services at lower rates than the telcos, or even for free: a constant threat to the revenue stream.
- Attractiveness of free service offerings from web/Internet companies enterting the world of unified communications (how many SMS/text messages are not sent because of the communication features within SNS like Facebook, with all the mobile clients available).
- Ever-increasing communication channels (Email, phone, cell phone, text messages, messages within Facebook or Twitter, …), meaning: telcos have less influence and control over communication channels, very different from the 90’s. The phone itself is turned into a communication hub by adding applications with communication features to it (Skype, Facebook & Twitter client, …).
And this list could be continued. One solution could be to offer the best possible unified communication service to your customer, integrating all the communication channels – and delivering all of that with an easy-to-use web-based interface. And to have the ability to extend that solution easily with custom applications. We are probably not going to see a clear winner here, since different groups of people show different communication habits and preferences. But Alcatel-Lucent has a very interesting product for a quickly growing market, and the product is interesting for unified communication in enterprises as well. Informationweek published a white paper on the development of the Unified Communication market in Europe, expecting staggering growth in this segment:
According to IDC’s market study* from April 2009, the European Unified Communication (UC) market will grow from its present size of $2.6 billion in 2008 to $13.5 billion in 2013, an annual growth rate of 39%. Even though the industry hasn’t fully defined the perimeter of what constitutes UC, the projected growth is staggering. Yet, there is little evidence that the UC vendors are making the required investments in order to capitalize on this growth opportunity. The larger and more established UC vendors continue to look for ways to scale back, to become leaner and to reduce cost. Obviously, the vendors need to be prudent, as the global economic downturn and the squeeze on capital markets have already produced many business failures. However the UC market is evolving very quickly, and vendors that don’t establish themselves as leaders by aggressively investing in their sales channels, will see this opportunity slip away.
I’m sure Google Voice and Alcatel-Lucent’s RCM are very interesting products not only for consumer, but in the enterprise communication world as well. But I’d expect telcos to be ahead of most enterprises in 2009/2010, although a combined offering of Google Docs, a future version of Google Wave and Google Voice could drive the adoption of next generation UC solutions. Especially with an expected release of Google Wave in late 2009.
