Avaya's biggest announcement since the acquisition of Nortel sees the company releasing a slew of contact center and workforce optimization applications, all based on Avaya's Aura architecture.
Avaya, a provider of business communications applications, systems
and services, announced a suite of new and enhanced product innovations
and services based on the Aura platform, as well as introducing its
next generation of contact center solutions designed to improve
customer service. A central component of these contact center
introductions is Avaya Aura Contact Center, which introduces a unique
approach to enhancing customer satisfaction and agent productivity
through Experience Management.
New and enhanced capabilities in Avaya's suite of Contact Center and
Unified Communications (UC) features increased security, scalability
and flexibility, plus common management and expanded use of
virtualization across the platform. Avaya Agile Communications
Environment (ACE) 2.2 includes Event Response Manager, a new packaged
application that automatically notifies the right department or person
to respond to and manage unexpected events, such as inventory
shortages, security breaches.
Avaya Aura Conferencing, now available in Standard Edition, provides
audio, video and Web conferencing features on a single server, while
Aura Messaging provides multimedia messaging with choices for accessing
and storing messages. 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 and Avaya one-X Agent and Avaya 9600 SIP
phones.
Among other announcements, the company highlighted Aura Session Manager
6.0, which now scales to over 100,000 users, including 50,000 SIP
phones and video capable endpoints and Aura Communication Manager 6.0,
which can now be deployed as an Evolution server for migration of mixed
H.323/TDM endpoints to SIP environments or a full SIP-based voice and
video feature server. Aura Session Border Controller (SBC) helps allow
enterprises to securely connect real time, SIP-based unified
communications to the rapidly growing number of IP-based devices, smart
phones and applications both within and external to a company.
The Avaya 9600 family of desk phones now offer larger, color touch
screen displays at a lower price point, function on lower power, while
a new value-priced SIP model, the Avaya 1603SW-I, offers small to
medium-size businesses (SMBs) a low-cost option. The company also
issued a release of Avaya Communications Server 1000 (CS1000), which it
said increases scalability, enhances SIP support and connectivity.
The Aura Contact Center is a multimedia work assignment application
for mid-size contact centers that connects customers and their
information to the right agent or expert via any communications mode,
such as voice, video, e-mail, or Web chat. It uses the Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based collaborative session model of Aura and
complements the large enterprise solutions of Aura Call Center Elite,
and will serve as its multimedia extension, the company said.
Other solutions include Aura Workforce Optimization (WFO), which
includes recording and quality monitoring capabilities, a workforce
management application that collects information and historical trends
from a contact center, and Proactive Outreach Manager, designed to work
with Avaya Voice Portal to reach out to customers via self-service.
Other contact centre introductions include a new version of Avaya IQ
5.1, a reporting and analytics solution, and Aura Call Center Elite
6.0, Avaya's call routing software for large enterprises.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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