Avaya Aura Radically Simplifies Communications With New Breakthrough Architecture That Flexibly Connects Users, Applications and Systems Anywhere
Dubai, UAE ? Avaya today announced the launch of a new era of business communications with Avaya Aura™, a breakthrough architecture that easily integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal businesses. Avaya Aura radically simplifies complex communications networks, reduces infrastructure costs and quickly delivers voice, video, messaging, presence, Web applications and more to employees anywhere. Avaya Aura will be available globally in May 2009.
The new architecture is anchored by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based, open standards Aura Session Manager, which centralizes communications control and application integration. Session Manager orchestrates a wide array of communications applications and systems by decoupling applications from the network. As a result, services can be deployed to users depending on what they need rather than by where they work or the capabilities of the system to which they are connected. Session Manager instantly reduces complexity and provides the foundation for broader unified communications strategies.
Avaya Aura is a cost saver in these difficult economic times. Businesses can leave existing multi-vendor equipment and applications in place and bring in the benefits and simplicity of Avaya Aura's architecture to drive significant and rapid return on investment and with the promise of greater business agility in the future.
The technology now addresses a key concern of businesses: incorporating social media in an effective, business-driven capacity. Using Avaya Aura, enterprises will finally be able to securely incorporate consumer communication methods, i.e. social media such as Facebook and Twitter, Short Message Services and peer-to-peer communications. For example, a communication session could be augmented with a social network profile on the participants. To do so would provide more context than is available with current capabilities such as CallerID and presence that could boost the outcome and value of the session. Similarly, widgets to social network home pages can be added to facilitate real time communications and enrich customer service transactions.
"With Avaya Aura, organizations can achieve rapid returns on their business communications investment, while simplifying the development and deployment of applications that improve operational performance," said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO, Avaya. "We've seen some organizations use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20 percent to 60 percent. With this new architecture, for the first time, the way we communicate is defined by the applications and the user, not the network."
"Each step in the migration from TDM to IP communications has to deliver operational and business benefits in the face of dealing with a hodgepodge of legacy and new infrastructure" said Abner Germanow, director of Enterprise Comms Infrastructure Research at IDC. "The recession has turned the attraction of reducing communications complexity and cost into a business imperative."
Avaya Aura offers the following benefits:
- Ability to create new applications and quickly extend them to users anywhere.
- Map applications to individual employee profiles, making the appropriate features globally available regardless of the location, system or device to which they are connected.
- Reduce costs through centrally managed, enterprisewide dial plans and on-net calling, global least-cost routing and PSTN access from the most cost-effective location.
- Eliminate local application servers and optimize software licensing across the full breadth of the enterprise rather than for a single location.
- Massively scale to 250,000 business users and 25,000 locations.
Avaya Aura includes industry-leading unified communications capabilities:
- Communication Manager, Avaya's flagship voice and video telephony software, becomes a business feature server, allowing the decades of customer innovation built into Avaya's PBX platform to be exposed as SIP features and services coordinated from Session Manager.
- Presence Services, formerly known as Intelligent Presence Services, takes a more central role within the communications platform, expanding the ability to federate presence from multiple sources and vendors for a more accurate view of an employee or work group availability.
- Application Enablement Services and Integrated Manager, which remain the same.
For companies with branch locations, Avaya Aura Branch Edition provides the capabilities of Avaya Aura as a SIP-based replacement for key systems in small locations, enabling companies to go from stand-alone stores and branches to a full, SIP-connected enterprise.
For small-to-medium size enterprises, the Avaya IP Office Customer Call Reporter is a new browser-based application that enables a small business to track and measure customer service and agent productivity levels.
Avaya Aura is supported by Avaya's new consulting framework - Avaya Strategic Communications Consulting, which helps businesses evolve their communications using the most advanced expertise, tools and capabilities. This new consulting practice builds on Avaya's strong record of helping companies meet business challenges using advanced communications technologies. Avaya also has one of the broadest portfolios of SIP-based communications applications and an extensive community of independent software developers through the Avaya DevConnect program.
Avaya Aura is easy to purchase in Branch, Standard and Enterprise Editions, and carries forward the "All-Inclusive" package pricing announced previously. Avaya Aura will be available globally in May 2009 through Avaya and authorized channel partners.
First Application for Avaya Aura: Avaya Intelligent Customer Routing
Avaya also announced a new contact center solution that is the first to benefit from the advanced Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technology available in Avaya Aura™. The solution - Avaya Intelligent Customer Routing -- helps businesses enhance customer experiences, while improving efficiencies and cost-savings in their contact center operations. It uses SIP technology to deliver customers and their essential information to the right agent or expert using the quickest and most efficient route possible.
Using Intelligent Customer Routing, customer service organizations can especially benefit from SIP, as contact centres can easily route customer communications and information more effectively around the world using multi-vendor systems, maximizing all of their agents and experts, regardless of which vendor's equipment they are on or which location they are in. This yields many customer-facing benefits, including quicker and more intelligent "wait treatments" the time that a customer spends in queue waiting for the right agent.
Intelligent Customer Routing not only gets customers to the best available agent anywhere, but also enables a more reliable transfer of customer information to an agent. This helps erase common customer frustrations by reducing the time it takes to reach an agent, helping to eliminate repetition of information upon reaching an agent, and even offering to call back a customer if a hold time is deemed excessive. Additionally, the solution can deliver messages during self service that are personalized for a customer's profile. For instance, if a caller is identified as a user of frequent flyer miles, she can get information based on prior travel, interests, or upcoming trips.
The product is available in EMEA immediately through both direct and channel sales.
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About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com
Press contacts:
The Portsmouth Group
Amber Dale
Telephone +971-4-3693575
Email amber.dale@theportsmouthgroup.com
© Press Release 2009
