Aerial view of a historic castle overlooking a city with red‑tiled rooftops

Stadt Nürnberg

Providing new communication channels and collaboration features for mobile teams.

Country: Germany
Industry: Government
Solution: Digital Age Communications, Rainbow, Cloud Communications, Unified Communications

With a population of around 550,000, the City of Nuremberg is the second-largest town in Bavaria and the economic and cultural center of the Nuremberg metropolitan region. Nuremberg’s Office of Information Technology provides the city's services, facilities and municipal enterprises with a modern IT infrastructure.

This internal service provider is also responsible for the technical implementation of the city’s digital transformation so the office wanted to optimize its internal and external voice communication and expand it with new channels. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise was able to help with a cloudbased communication platform.

We wanted to support mobile working with new functions, take advantage of the cloud and reduce IT costs. Thanks to Rainbow and our long-standing partners ALE and SPIE, we achieved these goals in a very short space of time.

Albert Roesch, Head of IT, Stadt Nürnberg

Challenges

The City of Nuremberg used Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch®, an on-premises Unified Communications solution. To meet the requirements for mobile work, desk sharing and remote working, the city needed a cloud platform that could integrate easily with the existing telecommunications solution. The new platform had to be GDPR-compliant, have BSI C5 certification and run on a Germany-based server of a European provider.

Action

In 2024, the City of Nuremberg decided to replace its existing solution with the cloud system, Rainbow Hybrid™ by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. In a first step, SPIE, the city's long-standing IT partner, implemented Rainbow for extensive testing by users from all departments.

SPIE completed the integration with the communication server in close cooperation with the IT team of the City of Nuremberg who developed a script for the data transfer from OpenTouch to Rainbow.

Once the test phase was successfully completed, the new solution was quickly rolled out to 5,500 users. They have now access to new features: chat, audio/video calls and conferences, presence information, sharing files and screen content.

Since going into operation in December 2024, Rainbow has been very well received by the city's employees. It is expected to scale to up to 8,000 users over the next few years.