Lucent exceeds 8 million messaging subs

Lucent Technologies announced today that it has more than 8 million active subscribers on its AnyPath Messaging System. That number represents a 16-fold increase since last November. The announcement coincides with the introduction of several enhancements to the platform including an increase in subscriber capacity of 60% and integration of VoiceXML.

Additionally, the vendor is now promoting a more distributed architecture that moves messaging servers closer to the end office switch. While moving to a less centralized architecture would mean buying more messaging servers, it also cuts backhaul costs by 50% to 75%, according to Susan Miner, director of marketing for Lucent’s messaging business.

“You would really grow [the number of servers] as your telephony servers as you need it,” she said.

AnyPath treats the voice mailbox as a communications hub, allowing users to manage their voice, text, photo and video messages through any end device. Perhaps most important in the new enhancements is the VoiceXML interface, which will allow Lucent or a third-party vendor to write applications for the platform. To that end, the company is currently working on a partner program that will be announced later this year.

“One of the things we’re seeing in the marketplace is the need for flexibility in the type of applications that can be developed,” Miner said.

Among the most active areas of development has been in speech activation and speech navigation, which allows users to manage messages without going through menu trees and keypad pushes.

With the capacity enhancements, the platform now can scale up to 5760 ports for 1.6 million subscribers and 180,000 hours storage time.