Avaya And Corporate Telephony Are The Leaders In Unified Communications

By Carolyn J Dawson
TMCnet Contributor

In their recent publication, Gartner's (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant has positioned Avaya as the leader based on its ‘'ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’ for both Unified Communications and Corporate Telephony.

According to a Gartner report, Unified Communications products facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods that include Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, e-mail, audio conferencing and Web conferencing, videoconferencing, voice mail, unified messaging (UM), instant messaging (IM), and other forms of mobility. Also UC products integrate communication channels (media), networks and systems, IT business applications and even consumer applications and devices. The report describes Corporate Telephony as "the provision of holistic voice communications for all wired and wireless users in large enterprises."

Gartner reports that UC’s best of breed approach ensures adequate functionality and planners require vendor products to be interoperable. Although most current solutions support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard, UC’s products additionally integrate seamlessly with third party products. The report adds that some products are applicable for specific environment and hence show limited interoperability while other products are designed to interoperate in multiple environments making them more flexible.

Avaya Aura is a SIP-based, core communications platform supporting unified communications and contact center solutions that easily integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal businesses. It simplifies complex communications networks, reduces infrastructure costs and quickly delivers voice, video, messaging, presence, Web applications and more to business users anywhere.

Alan Baratz, the senior vice president and president, Global Communications Solutions, Avaya said, “The open, standards-based flexibility of Avaya Aura coupled with the Avaya DevConnect program and its tens of thousands of developers and partners, provide an unparalleled network of leading technology companies to enable a fully-integrated, 'best in class,' multi-vendor approach to addressing the particular needs and purposes of a company.” He added that apart from real-time communications-collaboration feature, Avaya Aura solution can also provide up to 23 percent saving in capital expenditures and 33 percent saving in operating expenditures for large enterprises.

As a result of the Nortel acquisition and integrated with Avaya Aura, a new version of Avaya Agile Communications Environment allows companies to easily build communications-enabled applications (CEA) and business processes (CEBP) to speed workflow through a suite of packaged applications and an IT developer toolkit.