Paris - July 3, 2002 - Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced the Connected Business Employee initiative to help European service providers deploy managed contact center services to enterprises. The companies, together with NextiraOne Czech, also announced today that Czech Telecom is the first customer of the Connected Business Employee initiative.
The initiative teams Alcatel's service provider DSL infrastructure and the multi-media contact center suite from its Genesys subsidiary, with Sun Microsystems best-in-class line of Unix servers. Czech Telecom will offer its Connected Business Employee contact center service to small and medium-sized businesses in the Czech Republic over its network infrastructure to help businesses improve customer response without the need to create an internal contact center.
With the service, companies can have customer calls routed to specific employees along with all relevant customer information which is displayed on his or her PC monitor. These employees can add all customer transaction information into a database that can be linked to other systems like shipment or payment databases.
?We intend to offer the Connected Business Employee initiative to the SME segment that will benefit from state-of-the-art contact center functionality without the usual investments in technology and infrastructure, said Vladimír Stratil, CEO of Enterprise Unit in CZECH TELECOM. It is another example of CZECH TELECOM focusing on selling
sophisticated solutions that maximize the added value of our services through interaction with specific applications. CZECH TELECOM is the only telco provider in the market that is offering such convenient solutions to customers.
NextiraOne Czech, the former Alcatel e-Business Distribution s.r.o., is the system integrator for Czech Telecom for this service initiative.
Sun Microsystems is enabling the Connected Business Employee initiative by making the net work, with scalable, affordable, reliable and secure platforms, together with Sun One application layer? said Jean-Louis Auger, Sun industry solution manager for EMEA. The managed services solution we develop together with Alcatel will enhance SMEs business model.
Alcatel believes that as more sophisticated systems are required by enterprises to keep up in the Internet age, managed services will become a great alternative for enterprises to expand on their internal networks and systems,? said Patrick Ducrocq, director of strategic alliances for Alcatel enterprise activities. ?Working with Sun, we were able to deliver a system to Czech Telecom that was fast to install and deploy and showed the benefit of the Connected Business Employee alliance.
The Connected Business Employee initiative pre-integrates the hardware and software from Sun, and the software from Genesys and ensures that it can be deployed over ADSL so that service providers and integrators can more quickly deploy enterprise managed services. The initiative is aimed at providing a turnkey solution that allows a service provider to leverage its investments in broadband infrastructure in offering enterprise communications application services. This offering has been created within Alcatel/Sun Microsystems Alliance framework.
Alcatel, the market leader in broadband network infrastructure, sees the alliance as a way to help its customers leverage ADSL for profitable new services. The Genesys Suite 6 software from Genesys Telecommunications Labs provides complete networked multimedia contact center capabilities that can be delivered over the service provider network. Especially important is the recently announced Contact Navigator, a new desktop application that provides a streamlined graphical user interface (GUI) that enables users to simultaneously manage multiple customer interactions over phone, e-mail, chat and web collaboration.
About Czech Telecom
With nearly four million telephone lines in operation, ÈESKÝ TELECOM, a. s., is the leading telecommunications company in the Czech Republic. Through its subsidiary company Eurotel Praha, spol. s r. o., it also has a significant presence in the Czech mobile services market. ÈESKÝ TELECOM's main shareholder is the National Property Fund, which owns 51.1% of its shares. The company's main partner and second-most prominent shareholder, the Dutch-Swiss consortium TelSource, owns 27%. TelSource N. V. is a company of Swisscom and KPN Royal Dutch Telecom. KPN Royal Dutch Telecom also owns an additional 6.5% of the shares.
About Alcatel
Alcatel designs, develops and builds innovative and competitive communications networks, enabling carriers, service providers and enterprises to deliver any type of content, such as voice, data and multimedia, to any type of consumer, anywhere in the world. Relying on its leading and comprehensive products and solutions portfolio, stretching from end-to-end optical infrastructures, fixed and mobile networks to broadband access, Alcatel's customers can focus on optimizing their service offerings and revenue streams. With sales of USD 22 billion (EURO 25 billion) in 2001 and 99,000 employees, Alcatel operates in more than 130 countries. For more information, visit Alcatel on the Internet: http://www.alcatel.com.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer[tm]" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at: http://sun.com.
About Genesys
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alcatel (NYSE: ALA, Paris: CGEP.PA), is the leading provider of customer contact center solutions for Collaborative CRM, a critical component of a complete CRM business strategy. Genesys' integrated suite of open, infrastructure-independent solutions manages customer interactions across all media types, networks, and applications. Genesys enables personalized, cost-effective customer service and delivers a foundation for enterprise-wide business processes that generate long-term, profitable customer relationships. Headquartered in San Francisco, Genesys has offices worldwide and maintains a global network of strategic partners, including Accenture, Alcatel, IBM and IBM Global Services, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel Systems and Verizon. Visit http://www.genesyslab.com/ for more information.
About NextiraOne
Headquartered in Houston, TX and Paris, France, NextiraOne is a leading provider of network solutions and services. NextiraOne delivers world-class solutions and LifeCycleSM services from planning and design, through the implementation, support, and management of voice, data, and converged communications networks. As a global service organization that carries an extensive portfolio of certifications and product expertise, NextiraOne provides best-in-class technologies from leading partners, such as Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, and Alcatel. NextiraOne offers consultation and solutions development ranging from contact center applications to network infrastructure outsourcing. NextiraOne is owned by Platinum Equity ( http://www.peh.com), a global organization specializing in the acquisition and strategic management of mission-critical companies.
For more information, please visit: http://www.nextiraone.com.