Alcatel-Lucent enhances CRM suite

Alcatel-Lucent has released a major update to its Genesys customer service software, bringing customer interactions into one place, and providing a single overview of all correspondence, regardless of the medium through which it came, reports Computing.co.uk.

The company claims Genesys 8 now covers in-person, contact centre, Web, mobile and social media interactions.

"As consumers and technology have changed the ways we communicate, customer service must maintain context and continuity, which has been a difficult challenge," says Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, chief marketing officer for enterprise applications at Alcatel-Lucent.

Cisco hopes to bring more unified communications capabilities to small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) with the unveiling of enhancements across some key SME platforms, states Network World.

Specifically, Cisco rolled out additions to its Services Ready Platform CPE managed services gateway, Wireless VPN Firewall, and Cisco 100 Unmanaged Switch, according to this report by PC World's Patrick Miller.

The new Cisco SRP 526W and 527W Services Ready Platforms are unified communications appliances for ADSL2+ Internet access.

The latest edition of SugarCRM's open source CRM package, released as a public beta 13 June, includes a revised UI designed to deliver speedy, simplified navigation along with improved mobile accessibility, writes eWeek.

Sugar 6, which was introduced during the company's SugarCon user conference, is scheduled to become available to a subset of production customers in June and will be released to all customers in July, says Clint Oram, SugarCRM vice-president of products.

"We have spent quite a bit of time updating the user interface. What you will see right out of the gate is a very bold new look around the colour schemes," Oram states.