Alcatel-Lucent is the latest company to throw its hat into the enterprise unified communications and collaboration ring with its announcement today of the Visual Collaboration suite. It features cross-platform video and virtual whiteboarding solutions.
The video conferencing aspect will work on desktop PCs as well as dedicated video conferencing tools from vendors such as SMART Technologies, RADVISION and Lifesize.
The suite also includes a product called Interactive Whiteboard, which enables sharing of content between the Alcatel-Lucent My Teamwork application and the SMART Board 685ix interactive whiteboard system.
Video is becoming central to enterprise collaboration solutions. TIBCO just added video to its tibbr product, and Cisco has been pushing video calling capabilities in its Quad product since the beginning. Microsoft’s UC product Lync is at the heart of Office 365’s collaboration features, instead of typical enterprise 2.0 tools like activity streams.
Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.
