Genesys Passes Key Milestone with 100th Major Enterprise Customer Moving to SIP

• SIP Continues To Gain Momentum As Businesses Invest In Next Generation Customer Service Solutions

Wokingham, May 6, 2008 - A key IP telephony standard is quickly gaining momentum, as enterprises are moving quickly to leverage the SIP standard (Session Initiation Protocol) in their contact centres. Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) last week announced at G-Force that it has now reached more than 100 major enterprise customers that have begun SIP implementations using its customer service software.

"These new SIP customers are some of the largest enterprises in the world, with global operations," said Paul Segre, President and CEO, Genesys. "This milestone is an important indication of the market momentum that SIP is seeing, and we are certainly proud of the role Genesys has played in enabling that."

As the leading dedicated provider of customer service software, Genesys' growth provides a good snapshot of IP adoption in contact centres. Genesys noted that one of the drivers behind SIP adoption with Genesys software is the ability to leverage existing PBXs and telephony and reduce the need for future infrastructure, providing tremendous cost savings and flexibility.

"The evolution to IP communications has been slower in the contact centre than for PBXs, largely due to concerns about impacting customer revenues and service with still emerging technology," said Sheila McGee-Smith, President and Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics. "That delay is proving to have an unintended benefit. Standards-based SIP contact centre applications, like the Genesys suite working with SIP Server, are giving companies an opportunity to leapfrog over proprietary IP approaches and move directly from TDM to SIP."

Companies typically use SIP and IP telephony to virtualise their customer service and enhance their customer service operations. By deploying virtual contact architecture, businesses can simultaneously reduce costs and improve service by interconnecting multiple contact centres. They can also integrate a wide variety of other locations, such as branch offices, mobile experts, back office personnel, and even work-at-home agents. As a result, enterprises can improve the overall customer experience by quickly matching the most relevant and available resources for each customer, and avoiding excessive wait time.

The key advantages of SIP for enterprises include:

• Virtualisation that allows them to leverage both telephony and software applications across an entire organisation.
• Protection of existing investment by eliminating the need to rip and replace to any equipment while migrating to an IP telephony system.
• Separation of the telephony layer from applications, resulting in the freedom to select the hardware infrastructure and contact centre applications that best meets their needs today and in the future.
• Operational and productivity gains from fully utilising customer care professionals and experts in branch locations, remote offices, or affiliated partner organisations.
• Support for multiple customer service communication channels including voice, e-mail, and chat.
  

SIP is an application-layer control protocol used to create two-party, multiparty, or multicast sessions that include Internet telephone calls, multimedia distribution, and multimedia conferences. Originally designed by Henning Schulzrinne (Columbia University) and Mark Handley (UCL) in 1996, SIP is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer. It is widely used as a protocol for Voice-Over IP.

In addition to SIP, Genesys software supports virtually all IP and mixed platforms, and can be deployed on top of a broad range of next generation technologies. For example, it supports virtually every major softswitch, providing telephony capabilities from vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Broadsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens and Sonus.

_{About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the only company that focuses 100 per cent on software to manage customer interactions over the phone, web and in e-mail. The Genesys software suite dynamically connects customers with the right resources - self-service or assisted-service - to fulfill customer requests, optimise customer care goals and efficiently use resources. Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. These companies and agencies can leverage their entire organisation, from the contact centre to the back office, to improve the overall customer experience. As a result, Genesys helps stop customer frustration, drive efficiency, and accelerate business innovation. For more information, go to http://www.genesyslab.com or visit the industry blog at http://www.betterinteractions.com  
 
About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) provides solutions that enable service providers, enterprise and governments worldwide, to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. As a leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent offers the end-to-end solutions that enable compelling communications services for people at home, at work and on the move. With operations in more than 130 countries, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach. The company has the most experienced global services team in the industry, and one of the largest research, technology and innovation organisations in the telecommunications industry. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 17.8 billion in 2007 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com}

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