Unleash your business

Matthieu Destot

July 03, 2018

From healthcare to hospitality, business leaders are adopting CPaaS tools to improve productivity and collaboration.

Now is the time to unleash the power of your business communications. In this highly digital age, connecting and sharing information with your colleagues and business partners is easier than ever before.

After all, effective collaboration is essential to good business.

Collaboration when you’re on the move?
The mobile workforce continues to evolve, and businesses are increasingly looking to the cloud to gain agility and enhance collaboration. Businesses want simple deployment, an intuitive experience, and easy-to-use technology to support agile mobility. It’s critical that the solution used provides a rich feature set and a variety of ways to engage efficiently with colleagues over any device of their choosing. It should be infrastructure-agnostic, meaning that these tools can be seamlessly integrated with existing communications platforms and telephone systems.

Today’s workplaces are rapidly changing, and these tools must offer a variety of new capabilities to keep up in a high-speed, perpetually-connected digital environment.

Connect and share from anywhere
From our personal lives to the workplace, digital technologies have served to make it easier to quickly connect with people and places, share pertinent information, and securely collaborate without borders. Today’s digital workplaces are no exception, especially as the very definition of “work” evolves from an activity that used to require offices and meetings to one that can be done from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.

With mobile technologies proliferating across the enterprise and employees becoming increasingly able to work from anywhere, the concept of office life is rapidly changing. Now accustomed to powerful digital technologies and always-on connections in their personal lives, employees expect the same conveniences in the workplace.

In the past, the main hub of office communication may have been the water cooler or a conference room. Today, though, workers connect and share information regardless of where they are physically. Because of these trends, communication and collaboration tools are becoming the very lifeblood of today’s digital workplaces.

Mobile collaboration the way it should be

For example, let’s imagine Jane is away on a business trip. She’s working on her laptop to prepare for a big meeting in the morning when she realizes she may not have the latest version of the PowerPoint presentation. She opens her company’s communication platform and initiates a chat with John to ask him to send it to her. John quickly uploads the presentation right into the chat window and then video-conferences in the rest of the team so they can fine-tune tomorrow’s pitch. Jane shares her screen so they can all review her presentation notes. This tool allowed Jane to talk with multiple colleagues with just one click and streamlined productivity by allowing everyone to participate regardless of their location.

Go hybrid… or go home
To keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformation, many business leaders are incorporating cloud-based infrastructure, software, and services into their IT mix to enhance business agility and offer new, on-demand services to their customers and employees. But when it comes to their communications tools, many businesses are working with existing platforms and have familiar systems in place that they don’t want to rip and replace.

The answer for many IT departments is a hybrid solution, which uses a mix of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. This allows businesses to retain and continue using existing communication investments, while also enabling them to deliver innovative cloud-based services and capabilities to their employees, even those that might be working remotely.

Known as Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), these cloud-based solutions are designed to integrate with on-premises platforms to allow them to access a full range of cloud-based services. Through a simple and highly intuitive app, remote users can send and receive calls or instant messages, host or attend video conferences, or dial a coworker’s extension all from their remote desktop or mobile device. A hybrid strategy allows management to provide enhanced functionality for their users while making full use of their existing infrastructure and delivering on the promise of cloud services.

Connecting businesses in every industry, such as hospitality…
Office environments aren’t the only place where CPaaS tools can be of value. For example, hospitality companies can transform the guest experience and connect their entire hotel community (staff, partners, suppliers) using a single unified app. Imagine guests being able to connect with hotel staff at any point during their journey or stay, manage their own booking or cancellation, and rate their hotel experience directly through the app.

…and education
Students and teachers could also use a similar platform to connect with each other outside of the classroom, allowing students to enjoy a highly interactive and engaging learning experience. Healthcare, transportation, and government customers are also using these solutions to maximize productivity and offer enhanced services.
Unleash your digital workplace to be mobile and borderless

The Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow™ solution is a cloud-based collaboration app offering a set of powerful communications tools that seamlessly integrate into your existing in-house applications and business processes.

To learn more about how ALE’s solutions can help you unleash the power of your business communications, please visit our Rainbow webpage. You can also connect with us on Twitter at @ALUEnterprise or come find us on ALE LinkedIn.