"EBS is all the sizzle behind the idea of IP -- voice and data convergence," says Bob Long, product marketing manager for Lucent's Enhanced Business Services unit.
Customers can tap into the EBS next-generation feature server via a Web portal (see figure, right) to access their communications and information including calendaring, integrated messages, database and directory services.
Users can conference in a third person during a call using the directory on their PCs. During the call they can also share a presentation on their PC with a simple click of the mouse. In addition, they can move easily between the phone and PC to communicate, says Ken Arndt, vice president of marketing and sales support with Lucent.
Arndt says, unlike competing solutions from other vendors, the Lucent product does not require an IP phone to make it work. "One of the really big things is [our] ability to evoke traditional Centrex features using GUI in EBS. So users can, for example, do forwarding, call hold, pickup, redial, but served up in a way that's more intuitive so you can set profiles for find me, follow me," he says.
Also unique to the Lucent product, explains Arndt, is its tie in with popular calendaring applications. That way, end users only have to enter information about their schedule in their calendar, and presence management features can tap into the calendar to see where and when users are available. "Our presence and availability is not associated with the telephone," Arndt continues. "The only object that knows where you are all the time is your calendar. But, the majority of corporations out there don't have a ubiquitous calendaring function. Different groups and locations at a corporation tend to have different calendaring software. People can use our portal to tap into your calendar and see where you are. And call flow is tied in to the calendar automatically."
Arndt says service providers could use EBS 2.0 to realize a revenue stream in the neighborhood of $5 to $7 per user per month. EBS 2.0 as of late August was in lab trials with large RBOCs, reports Lucent.
The vendor declined to provide the names of those service providers, but chances are good that SBC Communications Inc. is one of them. SBC announced earlier this year it intends to deliver IP Centrex services based on Lucent's iMerge technology in Chicago; Hartford, Conn.; Houston; Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif., beginning this fall. At the time SBC said it initially would use iMerge to handle packet-to-circuit conversion between a SpringTide router on the customer side and a Class 5 switch, which iMerge interfaces with via a GR-303 connection, on the network side. SBC said the Centrex features initially will remain on the Class 5 switch or traditional intelligent network peripherals to the switch, and iMerge would simply pull them from the switch. However, at SUPERCOMM in June, Dan Alto, SBC's executive director of Centrex/Plexar, said SBC could add additional IP features on a server attached to the SpringTide router in the future.
