Welcome to Ringside. For new readers, this series asks inspiring people from all sorts of roles about their experiences in business. What will you get from Ringside? Insights and views on the challenges in cloud communications and what we might expect to see in the future in this industry. This time, we hear from Laure Timperman, who heads up the Rainbow Office business unit at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE).
Can you tell us a bit about your career and your role at ALE?
After graduating Cum Laude in law and business school, I started my professional career as a management trainee at the ICT and Telco Provider, Proximus, in Brussels. The fast-moving pace of the ICT environment, delivering end-to-end ICT solutions to enterprise customers and first in class services to all customers, excites me.
After five years, I moved to London to take a very exciting opportunity at Cisco Meraki, to start selling a full cloud as a Service LAN solution and convince customers in the early days to go full cloud. In 2018 I joined ALE to support the organisation’s transformation toward key verticals and ‘as a service’ models. Currently, I am managing our full cloud UCaaS solution Rainbow Office, in partnership with RingCentral from A to Z.
Our Rainbow Office (RBO) department has three main teams, sales, technical support and business development. Our team can offer local language and support from quote to cash, including 24/7 support in the local language in all Rainbow Office countries. (France, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Germany). We work closely with all ALE departments to embed RBO into our full product range. Recently, we established an IoT connection with the network department to offer full migration in any possible applications. Options are endless with the open API of Rainbow Office.
Could you share your view on the challenges companies face in this new era of hybrid work?
As a result of the pandemic, remote work has drastically accelerated, leading companies to revisit their strategies and accommodate the need for a hybrid workforce.
With this new demand new challenges have emerged for IT and business leaders. Indeed, they have to face the difficulty of keeping remote workers engaged, productive, motivated and not feeling isolated. Another complexity resides in identifying and deploying a communications and collaboration solution throughout the company that empowers employees to engage with customers and partners smoothly and securely. Finally, IT struggles with the performance and support of the devices, network and business applications in remote work while keeping an eye on their operational expenses.
How does Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral help with these challenges?
From an intuitive application, employees can control their communications, check their presence, chat, make or receive calls, and schedule and join audio or video meetings using a deskphone, mobile, laptop, or a video meeting room. They can switch communications seamlessly between media or devices. Everything is in one place, providing increased productivity.
As a global, secure and open cloud-based solution, Rainbow Office truly resolves any hurdles businesses meet and serves the needs of a growing hybrid workforce. It is global as it includes traffic to and from the public network, calling plans in more than 44 countries, and one number across multiple devices. The highly reliable 99.999% uptime and secure platform ensures privacy and security standards compliance. As an open platform, Rainbow Office enables quick and easy integration with business applications using APIs, SDKs and accessing an app gallery of more than 200 off-the-shelf integrations to help businesses streamline their processes and operate leaner.
Which Rainbow Office features and benefits bring a competitive advantage to businesses?
It is worth noting that some features are instrumental to businesses’ success in their daily operations and to increase customer satisfaction. For example, the telephony features have built-in advanced telephony, including auto attendant, call queues, smart routing, live reports or multi-level interactive voice response.
In addition, the platform provides a unified, simplified and centralised management interface from which people can complete administration activities remotely. In-depth analytics and reporting also offer breakthrough insights that keep IT teams informed on the quality of service at any time and accelerate the decision-making process. Combined with a 99.999% uptime, Rainbow Office is a highly reliable platform meeting any IT expectations.
Last but not least, as a leading provider of communications, networking, and desk phones, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise brings a complete portfolio of solutions and services tailored to accompany businesses smoothly at their own pace in transitioning to cloud communications.
What’s next for you and your team?
A few things are coming up! Here’s a snapshot:
- We are expanding from SMB to mid and large enterprises.
- We’re also enabling Microsoft Teams users to benefit from enterprise-grade telephony features (group hunting, voicemail, rule-based call transfer, IVR…) offered by Rainbow Office through native integration capabilities such as an embedded dialler or direct routing.
- We delivered more than 100 new features and improvements over the past year, and we will keep enhancing and bringing new innovative features.
We thank Laure for her insights and wish her success in the future. Look out for more episodes in this Ringside series. Remember, there’s plenty of advice and information across our blog and resources sections to support your business if you need help on anything from hybrid work to remote collaboration and infrastructure. Happy reading!
Originally published Oct 12, 2022
