Social media is playing a bigger role in enterprise collaboration, and the old way of doing business by communicating over voice calls and via e-mail is now obsolete.
This is according to Tom Burns, president of Alcatel-Lucent enterprise addressing over 2 500 delegates during the Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Tour 2011 in Barcelona, Spain.
Burns said: “Alcatel-Lucent is sending out a call to action for business to change the conversation. It's no longer sufficient to rely on voice calls or e-mail to do business.
“We are starting to see the consumerisation of the enterprise, where employees are bringing in their own devices into the organisation and are using social media tools to collaborate inside and outside of the business.
Yet, he said, 70% of workers today are still stuck in an unproductive way of collaboration. “Unified communications will kill e-mail.”
Burns explained that around 500 consumer business impressions occurred on the Internet last year, and 60% of those impressions were based on Facebook.
He said brand recognition through social networking Web sites is having a tremendous impact on how business is perceived, adding that business could no longer ignore social media.
Burns said as employees demand to work in new ways, business needs to manage the complexity of the proliferation of mobile devices, video content and media-rich applications.
“Between now and the next several years, there will be four billion smartphones, which is two-thirds of the world's population,” said Burns. “Within the next five years, 25 000 applications will be downloaded onto your smartphone.”
He added: “Doing business today is about collaborating through multimedia, multiple devices and multiple channels. This creates a productive enterprise, improves business processes as well as customer engagement.”
In his keynote address, Paul Segre, president of Alcatel-Lucent's software applications group, said business collaboration today is IT-driven and needs to be able to link video, document sharing, e-mail and voice calls.
“The network itself needs to change in order to create these new conversations. Throwing more bandwidth at a solution is no longer good enough.
“There is so much video that's now bringing bandwidth to its knees. Business can no longer anticipate the explosion of video traffic and mobile devices.”
In touch
Alcatel-Lucent made three key product announcements during the two-day international conference.
As part of its unified communications strategy to combine video, social media and mobile collaboration devices into the enterprise, the company introduced a data centre switching solution.
It introduced the OmniSwitch 6900 and says the solution and new architecture allows an enterprise to leverage its IT resources and optimise application delivery to employees across multiple locations and on multiple devices.
The company also unveiled OpenTouch, a converged communications platform that allows business users to communicate across multiple devices and operating systems.
Supporting its OpenTouch technology, Alcatel-Lucent released the OmniTouch 8082 My IC Phone, which the company says is a smart desktop phone that has built-in social media applications and a touchpad screen to bring people together into a multi-party video conference session.
For the rest of the year, the Alcatel-Lucent tour will cover 35 cities worldwide featuring live demonstrations, solution announcements, and best practices.
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