Rainbow CPaaS, first at UK National Innovation Awards 2020

London, United Kingdom – 06 May 2020 – Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE), a leading provider of communication, network and cloud solutions, has been recognised for its pioneering spirit by the Directors Club UK National Innovation Awards® 2020 with a first-place prize. The distinction, in the “Innovations in Collaboration & Internal Communication” category, reinforces the market-leading status of ALE’s cloud-based Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and the innovative excellence of the 101-year-old company.

The UK National Innovation Awards were launched in 2016 by Directors Club®, to recognise technology innovations and their impact on customer experience, operational performance, or employee engagement. Their unique judging faculty is drawn from the leadership of the divisions and departments pertinent to each award category. No judges are recruited from consultancies, suppliers, resellers or technology vendors. To reinvent the cost-model and ease of award program participation, while minimising the environmental impact of these events, a modern end-to-end all-digital process has been in place since the inaugural ceremony five-years-ago. 

With the challenges of 2020, the event’s all-digital awards delivery model triumphed, despite the judging week coinciding with the start of the UK’s national lockdown. Technology innovators from across the world were invited to enter the five categories of this open competition, with only the best shortlisted for the finals. This year’s competition has been even more stringently examined by a record 224 category judges, all of whom are Directors Club United Kingdom members. The live Gala Results Webcast took place on April 21st at 1:30 p.m. (BST) and was presented by the awards organiser and Directors Club founder, Jon Snow.

"Congratulations to Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise on their victory in the Innovations in Collaboration & Internal Communication category of the 2020 edition of the UK National Innovation Awards competition. This was a hotly contested category with a very high standard of entries from all three finalists. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s final ‘Our Innovation’ video demonstrated both as well as vision and creativity. The judges recognised its solution as offering significant business value-add,” said Jon Snow, organiser and founder of the UK National Innovation Awards programme.

The Rainbow CPaaS solution is a cloud-based technology that enables the integration of real-time communications into existing and new business applications without complex engineering, whatever the size of the company. CPaaS works as a digital hub that provides connections between people, objects, and applications, enabling all components to interact and understand each other. This enables faster, easier, more secure digital engagement while also driving companies’ digital transformation through the integration of communications, Internet of Things devices and Artificial Intelligence into the new business processes. These trends have shaped the last decade and appear to be being accelerated by the current crisis.

CPaaS is most relevant for organisations that need to interconnect the components of their business processes to reduce latency and improve efficiencies in the decision-making process, managing exceptions in real-time through Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). For organisations that understand how to harness the capabilities and opportunities, CPaaS’s power goes far beyond collaboration.  A step-by-step evolution through CPaaS, UCaaS, PBXs, and the Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow™ development tools takes you into the world of bots and AI — where answers are provided to customers quickly and accurately, objects are connected seamlessly, and next-level analytics are possible.

The 2020 UK National Innovation Award for the collaboration and internal communication abilities of the CPaaS solution, follows the IP-Insider Platinum Award 2019 for the Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess® Stellar Wireless LAN solution from ALE. This is in addition to winning the Best Cognitive Communications Solution category in the 2019 AI Breakthrough Awards Program, as well as other accolades and recognitions each year. The recent award from Directors Club is especially important in that it recognises the spirit of innovation ALE has maintained as the world changed over the company’s 101-year history.

“We would like to thank Directors Club and their esteemed faculty of judges for their recognition of our CPaaS solution for innovation in collaboration and internal communication. It is an honour to win first place in this category, and we congratulate all other category winners and runners-up,” said Craig Walker, VP Cloud Services at ALE. “Digital communications have become more important than ever in the current crisis, which will accelerate the digital transformation trends that we have seen in recent years. We are proud of our CPaaS solution and its family of technologies that can guide businesses, step-by-step, through their digital transformation journey.”