ALE, operating under the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise brand, has launched Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow, a cloud-based relationship management platform that connects business users, business contacts and systems.
Rainbow offers a set of cloud-based services, implemented as an overlay solution with rich features and essential collaborative capabilities, which are easy to deploy and adopt by users and companies, regardless of their existing communications systems.
The first release, Rainbow Essential, is available already as a freemium UCaaS offer (free Unified Communications as a Service offer). Capabilities included are contact management, presence, instant messaging, audio/video calling, screen sharing, and file sharing. It operates via an app on desktops and smartphones and is available free of charge to anyone by registering at www.openrainbow.com.
The Rainbow Essential overlay also embeds a hybrid approach with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and third party communication platforms (Q2’17) to provide investment protection and advanced services to the hundreds of millions of users of premise-based communications systems. The integration between Rainbow and communications systems brings additional capabilities such as telephony presence, telephony multi-site federation, and call control.
Premium Rainbow offers will be introduced in 2017. These offers, available through the extensive Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Partner network, will provide additional services to users (such as multi-party conferencing), additional services to administrators (such as user management, back-up, directory integration), and additional PBX integration services (such as advanced call control).
As a Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS), Rainbow’s open architecture offers a set of services that integrate with third party applications and business processes.
ALE is creating open APIs so developers can create custom applications and capabilities, especially for key vertical markets where apps add value to customers’ adoption of technology. For example, mobile banking apps can be enriched with chat capabilities from Rainbow. In the public sector or local government, agencies can get closer to citizens by connecting instantly with them, and airport platforms can leverage Rainbow to keep passengers informed.
“The features and benefits of Rainbow are aligned with what businesses need when it comes to workplace collaboration tools. Its open architecture will help Rainbow deliver further benefits to businesses in specific industries and help add to its adoption,” said Bill Haskins, Wainhouse Research.
Nicolas Brunel, EVP Communications Business Division at ALE said, “Rainbow delivers employees an innovative way of engaging spontaneously with their entire business community -- while IT managers benefit not only from a click-to-deploy app, but also from telecom cost reduction. This will support business’ digital transformation with innovative financial and consumption-based business models needed in the new ‘as-a-service’ economy.”
Steve Saunders, VP Cloud Services APAC said, “The launch of Rainbow today as a cloud-based relationship management platform, deepens the development of our New Business Models portfolio and complements the previous launches of OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud (telephony and unified communications) and Network on Demand (LAN and WLAN as a service). By bringing these complementary services to the market, ALE can truly differentiate by offering customers the ability to provision their networking and communications technology as a service per-user, per-day – aligning their costs directly with their business activity.”