Lucent and Sun to Provide Next Generation Electronic Business Offers - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, Dec 6, 1999

Addressing the need for reliable, high quality electronic business solutions, Lucent Technologies and Sun Microsystems Inc. Wednesday said they will jointly define new products and services that will spur the growth and effectiveness of Internet commerce.

In a related announcement Wednesday, the companies said they have allied to create the infrastructure needed for service providers and enterprises to support next-generation Internet business applications.

Under the collaboration, the companies said, they will jointly package and market new communications networking systems, Internet servers and turnkey solutions that will make it easier for enterprises and network service providers, including Applications Service Providers (ASPs), to build more responsive electronic businesses and to create hosted "marketplaces" that centralize the management of customer interactions.

"One of the biggest problems facing businesses is creating web centers and applications that get them into electronic commerce," said Rich McGinn, CEO of Lucent Technologies. "These joint electronic business solutions will solve that problem."

Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems, said, "In the telecommunications world, when you pick up a telephone handset, you expect to hear dialtone - every time. Mission critical business applications are increasingly dependent on having that same reliable, scalable communications networking infrastructure, as well as proven applications software. This is where the Lucent-Sun collaboration will create a significant impact."

Electronic Business Bundles Sun and Lucent said they would create new joint offers that facilitate electronic business, starting with four new bundles that will be available from Lucent Technologies. The bundles will enable enterprises and service providers to offer new applications and services more quickly and effectively. These solutions will allow both service providers and enterprises to host applications and to create hosted "marketplaces" that centralize the management of customer interactions.

The first offer, available immediately, is an Application Service Provider (ASP) hosted email application. Offers under development include intelligent customer relationship management, intelligent policy-enabled e-commerce, and communications portals.

All of these initial joint offers will include broadband access, enterprise and network infrastructure products, server platforms, Internet/intranet and operating environment software, communications and e-commerce middleware, applications and services. The offers will support IP telephony, multi-service LAN/WAN, secure VPNs, advanced billing and customer care at carrier-grade levels of quality, scalability and reliability.

ASP Hosted Applications The ASP hosted application is the first of a set of eReady offers from Lucent that will enable ASPs to set up scalable, high-availability web data centers to host network-based applications for small and mid-sized businesses. eReady offers will also enable enterprise to create hosting centers for their employees and business partners.

The first application is the Hosted Email Offer, built with a robust messaging platform from the Sun-Netscape Alliance. The solution includes security, load balancing, and subscriber management, resulting in high performance with operational efficiency, which are critical issues for email hosting application providers.

The Hosted Email Offer is now in beta test. Subsequent releases of this offer will add support for voice and fax, as well as other unified messaging services and integration with real-time packet voice capabilities.

Intelligent Customer Relationship Management The Intelligent Customer Relationship Management (CRM) offer, available to beta customers in 3Q00, will enable electronic businesses to dramatically improve customer service by making intelligent customer care an integral part of business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce. The offer will be based on Lucent's CRM Central 2000 and E-commerce applications from the Sun-Netscape Alliance.

Elements of the offer will include interactive, real-time customer interaction handling that integrates Internet and telephony interfaces to support intelligently managed communication with customers through multiple media types, including e-mail, web telephony, text chat, wireless and fax.

The joint offer will also incorporate Lucent's award-winning CentreVu Advocate routing logic which distributes customer interactions to agents or other resources based on customizable agent profiles and service commitments. In addition the Intelligent CRM offer will provide the integration framework required to tie together web and call center operations with a company's entire virtual extended enterprise. A key component of the offer is built-in support for user profiling and personalization that will provide a customer the same experience, no matter how, when or where that individual accesses the company's e-business operations.