Avaya Launches Next-Generation Customer Service and Collaboration Applications

Avaya today launched a suite of new and enhanced product innovations and services based on Avaya Aura that redefine the economics and effectiveness of real-time, multimedia enterprise communications. 

According to Jorge Blanco, Avaya’s vice president of contact center marketing, the new releases “touch on practically every layer of our stack with a number of new products and new updates.” 

The releases, he adds, are a continuation of the integration of solutions gained during Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business. Furthermore, they fulfill the company’s vision for “end-to-end experience management, connecting all the dots across all communications to provide a complete and holistic experience,” he says.

Avaya Aura 6.0 now features increased security, scalability and flexibility, plus common management and expanded use of virtualization across the entire platform. 

Included in the new release is a Proactive Outreach Manager that extends the self-service voice portal to automated outbound campaigns via voice, text, and email. “It’s a real-time application that can support inbound and outbound together. It can do thousands of projects at once,” Blanco says.

The only catch, he said, is that users need to be on an Avaya voice portal.

Other components of the new suite of offerings include:

• Avaya Aura Contact Center is a new multimedia contact center application that extends to all types of media, including voice, email, Web chat, fax, and instant messaging. “It can handle multiple contacts and brings together all the capabilities needed to run your own contact center rapidly because it’s so easy to integrate,” Blanco says.
• Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE) facilitates the development of communications-enabled business applications to speed business workflow. Avaya ACE 2.2 includes Event Response Manager, a new packaged application that reduces downtime and increases efficiency by automatically notifying the right people with the right skills to respond to and manage unexpected events. A new developer toolkit makes it easier to embed timely and personalized communications into business applications.
• Avaya Aura Conferencing, now available in Standard Edition, provides rich audio, video and Web conferencing features on a single server. The Enterprise Edition, available later this year, will expand capacity and features to enable internal operator assistance, emergency blast dialing. and more. Both editions integrate with UC applications from Avaya, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe.
• Avaya Aura Messaging provides rich multimedia messaging with choices for accessing and storing messages. The first release of this Linux-based solution is specifically designed to enable Octel users to easily migrate to the new platform by maintaining the familiar user interface while delivering new features, such as speech-to-text and speech-based virtual assistants.
• Avaya Aura Presence Services offers an open standards-based, native instant messaging solution providing federated presence for IBM Lotus Sametime, and IM and presence across Microsoft, IBM, Avaya one-X Communicator, Avaya one-X Agent, and Avaya 9600 SIP phones.
• Avaya Aura Session Manager 6.0 now scales to more than 100,000 users, including 50,000 SIP phones and video capable endpoints.
• Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0 can now be deployed as an Evolution server for easy migration of mixed H.323/TDM endpoints to SIP environments or a full SIP-based voice and video feature server. 
• Avaya Aura Session Border Controller (SBC) allows enterprises to securely connect real time, SIP-based unified communications to the rapidly growing number of IP-based devices, smartphones, and applications both within and external to a company. The SBC protects a customer’s network and connected devices from attacks such as denial of service, spoofing attacks, "man in the middle," or access through unused VoIP ports.
• Avaya Aura System Manager 6.0 provides for a common management system across Avaya Aura that now extends to presence services, conferencing, and messaging, making it easier to administer and manage Avaya Aura components from one central location.
• Avaya Aura System Platform 6.0, Avaya's virtualization technology, now encompasses all elements of the Avaya Aura architecture and applications portfolio.
• Avaya 9600 family of desk phones now offer larger, color touch screen displays at a lower price point, function on lower power, and provide a low total cost of ownership. A new value-priced SIP model, the Avaya 1603SW-I, provides a low-cost option for small- to large sized businesses.

The company also issued a new release of Avaya Communication Server 1000 (CS1000), which increases scalability, adds support for the IPv6 protocol and enhances SIP support and connectivity. The continued investment in Avaya CS1000 provides installed customers with a smooth migration path into Avaya Aura and supports many of the applications announced today.

Blanco says the new suite of products is aptly suited to “customers that are new to the space or want to connect products and services.” Customers can benefit from lower integration costs, lower total cost of ownership, a smaller footprint, and integrated real-time intelligence, he says.

Among the verticals being targeted are healthcare, retail, and financial services, according to Blanco, but the goal is to move existing Nortel Enterprise customers over to the new platform. “We will continue to support Nortel products, but when [Nortel customers] are ready to upgrade, this will be the platform that they will migrate to,” he says.

German energy provider Energiedienst Rheinfelden is among the first customers to adopt the new Avaya Aura 6.0 platform. The company provides electricity and other related services to more than 750,000 residents in southern Germany and Switzerland. With the adoption of the Avaya Aura 6.0 platform, the company can deliver superior collaboration and communications capabilities to its employees across its 26 locations, while creating a migration path for future communications investments. 

"Avaya Aura is strengthening our communications infrastructure for the future," says Friedhelm Bäumer, chief information officer at Energiendienst Rheinfelden. "It enables staff-members to communicate and collaborate in an immediate, fast, and efficient manner, even across sites. It is also making the switch from ISDN to SIP telephony a gradual one, allowing us to use existing equipment." 

More than 200 individual beta trials and or full implementations of Avaya solutions announced today are already underway. All Avaya solutions announced today are available now or will be available during the third quarter of 2010 through Avaya or authorized Avaya Connect channel partners.