Avaya Unveils Roadmap For Communication Offerings

Avaya has unveiled its vision for the future of communications and a roadmap that integrates products and services from the recently acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES) to create a new standard for business communications.

Avaya’s vision is based on open standards, communications-enabled business systems and contextual, real-time communications. Using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) organisations, large to small, can make smooth transitions to new capabilities at their own pace while protecting existing communications investments.

Roadmap Highlights

The new roadmap builds on the existing Avaya portfolio with capabilities integrated from Nortel Enterprise Solutions. The roadmap highlights include:

Unified Communications

The centerpiece of the unified communications (UC) portfolio is Avaya Aura, a SIP-based communication platform that unifies complex communications networks. With abilities to reduce infrastructure costs and easily deploy centralised collaboration and customer service applications, Avaya Aura provides an upgrade path for all existing Nortel voice and UC customers. The roadmap expands the value of Avaya Aura with the addition of Avaya (formerly Nortel) Agile Communications Environment (ACE). ACE uses Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services to facilitate the rapid development of communications-enabled applications.

Contact Centre

Avaya Aura is also at the centre of Avaya’s contact centre portfolio. With this foundation, contact centres can move to an SIP-based, service-oriented architecture, simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. The new contact centre solution will be based on a new and collaborative work assignment model that will connect customers, agents, and information. The new capabilities will enable businesses and organisations to stay ahead of growing customer care demands for tighter integration and lower costs.

The integrated roadmap will seamlessly extend the combined Avaya and Nortel Enterprise Solutions portfolio with capabilities for agent desktop, work assignment, experience management, and analytics that will scale from mid-range to large contact centres.

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Communications

Avaya IP Office, BCM, Norstar, PARTNER and Integral 5 all remain for sale with a plan to converge the platforms to the company’s flagship hybrid IP offering, IP Office. Avaya will blend Nortel features, interfaces and phones with IP Office to create a richer solution with strong investment protection benefits. This approach follows the model Avaya has successfully implemented with other systems into IP Office.

The company also now offers the Avaya Software Communication System, an SIP-based offer from NES for small and medium enterprise customers, who want to manage unified communications from their data centre.

Data Products

As previously announced, Avaya will adopt the current roadmap of NES data products in its entirety. A key component of plug-and-play communications is the underlying, enabling network and the new Avaya data portfolio brings advantages of network efficiency and scalability to grow with customers’ business needs. Included in the Avaya data portfolio are solutions for Ethernet Switching, Routers, Wireless Networking, Access Control and Unified Management.