Another Log on the Tablets-for-Enterprise-versus-iPad FireAnother Log on the Tablets-for-Enterprise-versus-iPad Fire

A software company releases an iPad app for Alcatel-Lucent's MyIC platform.

Being an early iPad adopter (I pre-ordered V1 and have had it for over a year) I love to see enterprise applications making their way to this increasingly ubiquitous device. User after user that I spoke with at the Alcatel-Lucent event in Barcelona talked about not if they would support iPad but how. A university engineering school IT executive talked about how he had an iPad2 the first day they were released because he had to know how his network would respond when that first student logged-on with it. A real-estate company discussed how his environment needs to support both agents and clients that want to use the iPad to view listings, perhaps while sitting in a Starbucks.

I have repeatedly applauded Cisco's ability to have a WebEx application available in the Apple App Store on day 1 of iPad availability. For iPad2, Cisco has already improved the free application to support 2-way group video conferencing. With Cisco’s massive R&D budget and organization, it's not surprising that they have been able to be so responsive.

I was perhaps more impressed by an enterprise application I saw in Barcelona last week at the Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Tour event. Mariusz Roznowski, President and CEO of Xnet Communications in Hamburg, demonstrated an application the company launched at CeBit 2011 and began shipping in March, My IC for Apple's OS X and iOS platforms, notably the iPad.

What is exciting to me about the app is that it was NOT written by Alcatel-Lucent. It was written by a small firm that describes itself as "an independent technology center whose core business is the creation of high-end solutions for data communications." If you have an iPad and a My IC license, you download the application for 349 euros (just over $500 USD) and off you go. The main applications on the iPad are instant messaging and conferencing; the Mac version includes full softphone capability. Roznowski said that the applications were built using Advanced Communications Server (ACS), Alcatel-Lucent's web services platform that is similar to Avaya’s Agile Communications Environment (ACE).

I asked Roznowski about the pictures populated in the directory used during the demo--so few people actually put profile pictures in their Outlook listings. He said that what I was seeing was his live directory and that many of the pictures had been populated from Facebook (if they were friends and had set the appropriate permissions).

It is clear that Alcatel-Lucent is excited by the application; Xnet was given the EMEA Innovation Partner of the Year award at a partner meeting held in conjunction with the Dynamic Tour event. And why not? Xnet’s application is a fabulous proof-point for the openness ALU feels so strongly about they put in it the name of the new converged architecture (OpenTouch).

In one of the sessions in Barcelona, Alcatel-Lucent gave equal time to the Xnet solution and to an internally-developed solution, iTeamWork, that the company is working on. Will the ALU version be more tightly integrated? Perhaps. Will it be able to be managed by the OpenTouch management suite more easily? Maybe. But for the customer who wants to add ALU communications capabilities to their iPad today, Xnet offers not only a shipping solution but one that can be customized by Xnet for specific environments, e.g., CRM integration.