Alcatel-Lucent demonstrates how hotels in Saudi Arabia can delight their guests with higher levels of convenience and comfort and generate new revenue

The summit - organized by Business Information Company, naseba - was held at the Four Seasons Hotel Riyadh and provided a business networking platform and knowledge sharing environment for government officials and industry professionals in the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors.

Today's guests arrive at a hotel with a high level of expectations - a hotel room needs to be their home away from home, and offer new services, experiences and conveniences. But hotels also have to maintain the balance of achieving a healthy bottom line while enhancing the guest experience, creating guest loyalty and attract new customers.

During the summit, Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated how hotels in Saudi Arabia can transform their properties and create a true competitive advantage by blending the latest voice, data, and video services over a single network infrastructure.

"Advanced communications applications and services that address guest expectations and improve staff efficiency are now critical to maintaining the balance between profitability and guest experience" says Xavier Mongin, Alcatel-Lucent's Global Accounts Director for Enterprise Solutions in the Middle East. "The key to creating a modern guest-centric environment is to integrate the right technologies in the right way to create a ubiquitous and efficient network that can support guest services and hotel operations. Alcatel-Lucent's dynamic technology for the hospitality sector can strengthen customer loyalty, drive new sources of revenue and lower operating costs." Mr. Mongin adds.

In the occasion, Alcatel-Lucent showcased its new Smart DeskPhone - the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 8082 My IC Phone - which combines the experience of a smart phone with the reliability of a desk phone while leveraging the power of an open applications platform.

"The enhanced user experience and lower overhead costs made possible by Alcatel-Lucent's new OmniTouch 8082 My IC Phone will provide a strong foundation for the fast growing Saudi hospitality market." explains Mr. Mongin.

The new phone brings together multimedia communications capabilities and web applications to create personalized mashups or industry-tailored applications. It has a large touch screen which leverages new and existing applications and capabilities, such as instant messaging, presence, contextual applications, integrated e-mail, and MP3 music which can be brought together on the desktop. It will serve as an application pod featuring an open API developer platform similar to the approach taken in the applications explosion in the mobile space, and will be integrated with the next generation Unified Communication services from Alcatel-Lucent.