Lucent and Sun provide voice and data integration

Lucent has announced a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems to integrate its Octel messaging platform and text-to-speech technology with the Solaris operating system and Sun Internet Mail.
According to Sun and Lucent, the product will be the first integrated messaging solution scaleable enough to be used by Internet service providers (ISP) and telcos to offer unified messaging services.
The service allows users to access email and fax messages from a conventional phone. The two companies say they will start marketing the product by spring 1999.
Annoula Peppas, consultant at research company Schema, said: "ISPs and telcos are all moving towards advanced services. Universal messaging is one of the key areas they are concentrating on. But I think it's driven by technology rather than user demand."
Peppas believes the key adopters of any unified messaging service will be small and medium sized enterprises and home office workers who are already using email but have no access to legacy corporate phone systems.