Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager is something Google Voice should be worried about

Unveiled at CTIA today, Alcatel-Lucent showed it’s Rich Communications Manager. The messaging portal allows both mobile and on-line web access, and offers the user a single location from which to access a full range of messaging media. Users can check their voicemails, SMS, MMS, emails and fax from the portal - and can respond and forward in kind. On top of that, all users get a built-in address book for all of their contacts.

To make it easy to use, Alcatel-Lucent has gone for a desktop-style design that people are familiar with. Content can be dragged and dropped across all the available message forms, from voice mail to MMS.

Much like Google Voice, it also provides visual access to voice mail - providing a queue of messages, with voice to text transcripts allowing users to read their voicemail.

Alcatel-Lucent will also be releasing a communications widget based on the Rich Communication Suite. Third party developers will be able use this widget in mash-ups with their existing apps, so that the above functions can be integrated with other services.

From the release:

“The Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager gives service providers a platform that helps them maximize the reliability, quality of service, identity management and trusted relationship they already provide to customers,” said Gani Nayak, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Communications business. “By helping our customers unify their voice communications across multiple devices and networks — eventually integrating Web 2.0 services — Rich Communications Manager gives service providers the tools to fundamentally improve and simplify how we communicate by integrating different services in a single portal.”

What we think?

The first thing I thought of when reading about this was “here’s something else being released quickly, before Google Voice arrives”. But the more I read, the more I became convinced that this is a serious competitor to Google Voice. While the Google service is incredibly handy, it’s also requires users to get a new phone number. Now that’s not a huge barrier, but if all the same functions of Google Voice can be offered to someone without having to change a thing then why wouldn’t they go for it?

Another big advantage of the Rich Communications Manager service is it’s mash-up capability. With this, Alcatel-Lucent have provided a secure, easy way for third party developers and carriers to integrate these highly desirable VAS into their own systems.

Only time will tell, but this looks like something Google should be worried about.