With today's announcement of Avaya's Flare® Communicator for Apple iPad* Tablets, Avaya continues to bring enterprise communications to your fingertips.
Here's some insight into Avaya's plans authored by the UC Clients Portfolio Lead at Avaya, Praveen Mamnani (email pmamnani@avaya.com)
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It's early Monday morning and you're getting ready to leave for a business trip. You grab coffee while checking the weekend's emails on your iPAD tablet. Suddenly, the "15-minute reminder" pops up to review customer escalation report...with your boss. The next 10 minutes might proceed something like this:
"Oh great,".you think. "My team lead in India didn't email the update over the weekend." You scramble to start up your laptop and get on your work VPN so you see if it came in overnight. "What a pain! I don't have the team lead's phone number in my iPhone contacts, and I don't know if he or anyone else from the India team is still online who can talk right now so I could conference in with my boss."
Of course, your laptop's VPN client is not connecting and the boss is calling now.
"Sorry, Mike," you say. "I don't have that information here. "I'll have to get back to you on that."
Sound familiar? You're not alone. Business professionals everywhere are increasingly mobile, overloaded with information and pressured with deadlines. With a global work force always on the move, the ability to reach and collaborate with your co-workers, partners or customers anytime, anywhere, has become more critical than ever before. In an effort to manage these challenges, corporations are shifting to mobile communications and adopting Unified Communication systems more rapidly than expected to try and manage the mobile/virtual workforce challenge.
According to a survey commissioned by BroadSoft, 62 percent of IT leaders are expanding their enterprise's UC capabilities, with instant messaging, web collaboration and videoconferencing identified as the top UC services IT managers are looking to support on mobile devices over the next three years. In addition, as the "consumerization" of IT accelerates, end users expect simple, intuitive, rapid and ubiquitous access to applications from their mobile devices enabling them to collaborate as if they were sitting in the office.
Avaya has been delivering enterprise mobile solutions since early 2000, first with EC500 (extension to cellular), then Avaya one-X® Mobile portfolio with clients on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
Today, we're enabling our customers to further embrace a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategy with the launch of the Avaya "Flare® Communicator for iPAD. Flare Communicator is light weight version of the full Flare® Experience delivering an intuitive, easy to use, fun interface, enabling an employee to collaborate instantly and continuously with coworkers, supervisors, customers and partners from ANYWHERE. With the Flare Communicator for IPAD, you have the flexibility to carry your business communications anywhere for faster collaboration and better business results.
So let's revisit the earlier scenario using Avaya Flare Communicator for iPAD.
You grab coffee while checking weekend's email on your iPAD. Get the meeting reminder screen pop; launch Flare and roll the contact cards with your finger and notice your team lead is online. Drag his card into the Flare spotlight and launch an IM session. Get report update. Proactively add boss to the conversation by bringing him in another spotlight. Discuss, determine course of action. End call. Finish coffee.
No more time spent searching your contacts or booting up the laptop to locate and IM or call coworkers while the clock is ticking. A swipe of the finger on the touch optimized Flare experience enables you to simply flip through your personal or business contact cards, drag-n-drop people from your global work force in the "spotlight" and make smarter decision on the spot.
Last month, during a business trip From Denver to the East coast on a flight that had Wi-Fi access, I decided to push the limits. I told the Flare development team I would be doing some special tests from my office to see if I could collaborate with a new feature called "Flare in the Air". They were puzzled. When I called into the meeting, they saw me in the spotlight but didn't realize my voice was coming from 30,000 feet over Nebraska. During the call inflight, I exchanged IMs with developers and received another call from my 5 year old son. Within seconds I escaped to another Flare spotlight and we were both happy to hear each other's voice.
Want to join me in the spotlight? Get the application from the Apple app store today. Your IT administrator needs to provision a Flare Communicator for iPad license and SIP extension on the Avaya Aura system. Try it out and contact me (email pmamnani@avaya.com) with your views and reviews about what's good, what needs improvement and what you think should be next. We'll be aggressively adding new features so your feedback and comments will be greatly appreciated.
Now when you get your Flare Communicator I recommend you use this "Flare in the Air" feature with care. You may annoy that guy next to you if he's trying to catch a nap before landing. Try not to get into any "Alec Baldwin gets kicked off the plane with iPAD" situations.
*iPAD is a is a registered trademark of Apple Inc
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