Avaya Makes Sweeping UC And CC Upgrades

By Chad Berndtson, CRN
8:00 AM EDT Tue. Jul. 20, 2010

Avaya on Tuesday made substantial updates to its unified communications and contact center portfolios. The goal, according to Avaya executives, is to maintain an "aggressive' product release pace for the combined Avaya and former Nortel channels but also be sensitive to each portfolio's large installed base.

Among the major updates is Avaya Aura Contact Center, a multimedia work assignment application that ties voice, e-mail, Web chat, instant messaging and other tools using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based communications.

It is Avaya's intended upgrade path for the customer base that uses Nortel Contact Center 6 and Contact Center 7 offerings, and is targeted as an all-in-one product set for mid-sized contact centers with 1,000 agents or less. According to Avaya, it can manage as many as six types of communication transactions -- one voice and five non-voice -- simultaneously.

Other new contact center offerings from Avaya include Avaya Aura Workforce Optimization -- which includes recording and quality monitoring capabilities -- and Proactive Outreach Manager, which customers can use to customize outbound notifications such as for manufacturers, product shipment data, or for hotels, room rate promotions.

There's also an update to Avaya's analytics tool, Avaya IQ 5.1 that can monitor and provide information for up to 900 simultaneous users, and broader capacity for Aura Call Center Elite 6.0, Avaya's main call routing software for enterprises.

"This is a complete solution: a complete stack that we can take to market," said Jorge Blanco, vice president of contact center marketing for the vendor. "For partners, we see it as an opportunity to increase their share of wallet and also simplify support interactions both pre- and post-sale."

Among other product updates, there's an update (version 2.2) to Avaya's Agile Communication Environment (ACE), which adds notification services through an application called Event Response Manager. Those services, according to Avaya, allow customers faster response in the event of inventory shortages, security breaches or other occurrences, and they come with a developer toolkit for use in adding personalized communications.

Next is Avaya Aura Conferencing, which comes in two editions, Standard and Enterprise. The Standard Edition, available now, offers audio, video and Web conferencing features on a single server, and the Enterprise Edition, available later this year, adds more features such as internal operator assistance. According to Avaya, both editions can be integrated with various UC applications from Avaya, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Adobe (NSDQ:ADBE).

Further along is Avaya Aura Messaging, a Linux-based offering designed to migrate users of Avaya's Octel messaging service to a new platform that uses the familiar Octel interface but adds speech-to-text, speech-based virtual assistants and other bells and whistles. There's also Avaya Aura Presence Services, a native instant messaging platform offering federated presence and instant messaging for Microsoft, IBM, Avaya one-X Communicator, Avaya one-X Agent and Avaya 9600 SIP phones.

More Updates And Avaya's Release Strategy

Among other product and services updates are a boost to Avaya Aura Session Manager, whose 6.0 version scales to more than 100,000 users (including 50,000 SIP phones or video endpoints), and an update to Avaya Aura Communication Manager, whose 6.0 version offers more choices for migrating to different server set-ups.

Elsewhere, Avaya is debuting Avaya Aura Session Border Controller to protect customer networks and devices from denial-of-service and other attacks, as well as updating its Avaya 9600 family of desk phones to include larger displays. One new phone, the Avaya 1603S1-I, is intended as a low-cost SIP model.

Finally, Avaya has provided a new release of Avaya Communications Server 1000, which adds IPv6 support and greater SIP support.

The ultimate goal, offered Avaya executives, is a less-siloed product portfolio that's collectively branded under Aura and connects Avaya's various products logically.

"We're doing high quality training to make sure everyone understands the intricacies of how different elements within the suite come together," said Steve Hardy, director, global product and solutions marketing. "We're shifting from siloed products to a much more integrated set of capabilities, but also being very open to third parties."

Avaya won't be dropping any existing Avaya or Nortel products with Tuesday's announcement.

"We are not going to maintain all of the products that were assembled when we added Nortel's portfolio to our own, but we are taking a very gradual approach to make sure we are not disruptive," Blanco said. "We are not announcing any [dropped products] with this launch cycle."

Avaya's product portfolio upgrades continue as planned, even among major changes in its executive ranks.

In early June, Avaya confirmed that Todd Abbott, senior vice president of sales and marketing and president, field operations, would step down and be replaced by Joel Hackney, former president of Nortel's enteprise business unit.

In late June, Hackney told CRN that Avaya was "high-touch, channel-centric and focused on acceleration."

Avaya 1600-I sets supported in IP Office Version 5.0 Maintenance Release

With the IP Office Version 5.0 Maintenance Release (R5 MT), IP Office now supports the 1600-I phones. These phones are available at the same price as the previous 1600 phones, however, they offer significant advantages, including a higher quality display for better clarity, and easy-to-read white backlight that is consistent with the 1400 and 9600 phones. Customers currently using 1600 sets can continue to grow with the 1600-I phones (requires R5 MT). If you are currently running version 4.2, the upgrade to IP Office R5 is available at no additional cost.

Last winter, Avaya announced plans today to make certain 1600 Series IP Deskphone models End of Sale over the next 6 months along with this migration plan for customers.

Effective August 9 2010, Avaya will no longer offer for sale the following 1600 Series IP Deskphone models: 1603, 1603SW, 1608 and 1616. This is part of a product line consolidation effort that will simplify portfolio planning and support for Avaya customers and partners. Avaya is making all possible efforts to make this an easy and positive transition for our partners and customers.

The 1600 Series IP Deskphones going End of Sale in this announcement will be replaced globally by the new Localized 1600 Series IP Deskphones (1603-I, 1603SW-I, 1608-I and 1616-I). These new phones incorporate an LCD with a white backlight and wider language support than the original 1600 Series IP Deskphones. All other features and capabilities are identical between the two lines of phones. Effective February 8 2010, the Localized 1600 Series IP Deskphones will be offered at the same Global List Price as the End of Sale materials.

However, TRC Networks will continue to offer these products (subject to availability). Support will also be offered for these products well beyond 2013.

Avaya preps one-box data-center strategy

Avaya banks on customers wanting multi-vendor environments to compete against Cisco

Avaya is prepping to launch its one-box data-center strategy early in October -- the VSP 9000 switch -- as a counter to Cisco's more comprehensive approach.

The Avaya plan differs from Cisco's one-box strategy in that Avaya's box is purely a switch, while Cisco's is a chassis containing a switch, servers, storage and applications.

Avaya has little choice but to present a limited offer because it lacks the other components among its assets. Until it bought Nortel last year the company described itself as a communications software specialist, but the purchase brought along Nortel's collection of networking gear, including the in-development VSP 9000.

Now with the switch in customer trials prepping for release, Avaya is making a virtue out of its approach and finding fault with Cisco's "toaster box" solution -- as Avaya's vice president and general manager of data solutions Steven Bandrowczak calls Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS).

Bandrowczak says UCS doesn't provide customers with the same flexibility that a multi-vendor data center infrastructure does. For its part, Cisco says its UCS architecture improves management, energy efficiency and the need for peripheral gear.

But Bandrowczak says the right way to approach data center design is by analyzing all the applications then fine-tuning the rest of the infrastructure to make them perform optimally. "You don't make a data center decision based on a box," he says. "It starts with your application, and you look for the optimal environment for running that application."

He says Avaya is focused on the infrastructure piece of the equation, and leaves the rest up to other vendors, allowing customers to pick and choose among products that best fit their particular needs. For instance, Bandrowczak says CIOs tweak their data center infrastructure to fit the demands of their applications, which can mean tinkering with memory, CPUs and types of storage to boost performance -- which can be done better if customers deal with vendors specializing in that kind of gear.

That means dealing with more vendors, something customers may wish to avoid. Still, Avaya has absolutely no interest in supporting other key elements of a broad data center strategy such as applications, servers, storage and databases, Bandrowczak says; it's sticking with the VSP 9000.

The company plans to market the device to current Nortel switch customers who might reasonably be expected to appreciate the technology. Bandrowczak says it will also market to Avaya's voice and unified communications customers -- a bigger stretch. It's not apparent that a business open to Avaya's communications offerings would have no inherent reason to consider Avaya's data center switch. Indeed, it's likely the decision maker on data center switches isn't the one deciding about communications.

On the economic side of the equation, the switch will save businesses money, but not on the price of the switch itself. If considered along with energy consumption, acquiring and maintaining the space it occupies and the fact that it's designed to last seven to 10 years rather than three to five, total cost of ownership is 40% to 50% less than competitors' TCO, Bandrowczak claims. He doesn't quote specific dollar amounts. The switch will support over time 10Gbps, 40Gbps and 100Gbps interfaces as they evolve and backplane upgrades, he says.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

By Tim Greene, Network World
June 28, 2010 11:12 AM ET

Unified Communications Is Changing IT Technologies

By Randy Muller, Global Knowledge Instructor

Unified Communications - We live in a highly connected world (perhaps too connected at times) with numerous communication technologies all competing for our attention. These disparate communications technologies were all developed and have grown into commonly accepted use separate from one another. In order to use these technologies, we may have had several accounts: one for conferencing, another for email, a third for instant messaging, and yet another for voicemail, and perhaps even other accounts. Each of these systems most likely had separate user names and passwords. In order for users to access them, they would have had to remember them (or write down). Network and telephony administrators had to keep these different systems working, sometimes with limited success and much difficulty.

Unified Communications combines these different systems together into a single communications platform. Now your telephony system can not only handle your voicemail, but send you an email letting you know that you have a voicemail. Conferencing is no more than a click away from a contact in an email. You can see if a colleague is available by checking their on-line presence. You can also receive IM's from outside clients on your internal IM system. A single communications platform - makes it easier for users to keep in contact with others and easier for administrators to maintain.

Read full article at Global Knowledge >>>>

Avaya Healthcare: Leveraging Telecom Solutions to Improve Patient Care

"Most people think of us as the phone guys," says Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya's (News - Alert) Healthcare Solutions division, "but we're much more than that." In fact, he continues, "Avaya has made a sustained investment in R&D to create solutions that improve clinical workflow." Gupta believes that how we use communication tools can make a significant impact on the life cycle of patient care, from preventative medicine to chronic care management.

Avaya, formerly part of Lucent Technologies and before that, AT&T (News - Alert), has focused on providing communications solutions to businesses since the days of those indestructible, black rotary phones. Over the years their product set has evolved to complex phone systems, call centers solutions and Voice over IP. So while they continue to develop new applications, many of Avaya's innovations in healthcare communications are actually created by leveraging existing technology.

For example, Gupta says that the Avaya team discovered that at one large hospital, there were somewhere between 600 to 900 chronic care patients per care manager. In order to cope with the huge patient loads, care managers were performing simple triage, assigning red, yellow or green severity to each of the patients. But without on-going monitoring, "yellows were becoming red, greens were becoming yellow … there simply was insufficient time for follow ups."

Avaya's Patient Contact Solution addresses this problem, using existing telephone technology to reach out to patients with features like automated medicine reminders, requests for glucose monitoring data or to call the patient and ask them to enter their latest blood pressure reading. On the back end, data is collected and integrated into the patient's electronic medical records. Avaya uses standard interfaces with their products so integration to a hospital or clinic's records is seamless.

Avaya is also working to help nurses spend less time with administrative tasks and more time with patients. For instance, within the hospital setting, coordination between departments is often inefficient and expensive. Delays in the hospital admissions and discharge processes can cause back up in the ER, forcing patients to wait to be moved to their rooms. Nurses spend a significant part of their day tracking people and assets and trying to keep the patient process moving. Avaya's Patient Discharge Solution is designed to help with this by automating discharge approvals and notifications, moving patients through the process more rapidly.

Another way Avaya is trying to decrease non-patient time for nurses is with their Mobile Device Checkout. Nurses scan their badge and a mobile phone and the device is automatically programmed to match their contacts lists based on their assignment. They also get alerts about patient status. So nurses aren't sitting at a desk trying to reach doctors or specialists; instead, the system does it for them automatically and updates them via the phone.

Gupta has seen increased interest in healthcare IT spending on the part of hospitals and says that decision makers are "getting pressure because of stimulus spending and the need to have full EMR adoption." Avaya is certainly not without competition from telephone systems providers. Companies like Seimens and Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) have divisions that focus on healthcare solutions as well. However, he is finding they are able to open doors because of their reputation for quality and reliability. Or maybe it's the fond memories of those old black phones.

By Robin Wright , Consultant http://medhealth.tmcnet.com/

BT and Polycom Enhance Services and Solutions Based on Microsoft OCS Technologies

By Nathesh, TMCnet Contributor

BT (News - Alert), a provider of communications solutions and services and Polycom, a dealer in telepresence, video, and voice solutions, have commented that they have collaborated to develop end-to-end suite of enterprise solutions and services based on Microsoft (News - Alert) Communications Server. The companies also have enhanced their solutions based on current and future releases of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) technologies.

The new set of solutions from the companies are supposed to deliver integrated application, network and system interoperability combined with flexible options including architectures which can be deployed in traditional on-premise, managed service and cloud scenarios.

BT claims to have designed reference architectures to assure customers that Microsoft and Polycom (News - Alert) technologies will be integrated into solutions that are not just built for server and software platform but for the full network impact and utilization. Polycom has claimed that with their extensive expertise and their global SIP networks that were recently certified for use with Microsoft OCS, customers can get to pursue a steady transition that brings together their existing and next-gen technologies into a single unified communications service.

Officials with BT have commented that delivering unified communications services and solutions to large enterprise customers is demanding and complex, and the key is to give users a set of simple and convenient tools. Their company is well positioned to deliver on the promise of UCC. With their breadth of networked IT Services, clear investment roadmap, extensive integration experience and accredited professional services coupled with the use of their network monitoring, management and optimization services such as Application Assured Infrastructure, they ensure that all their customers get the best unified communications experience.

Garry Reichert, Polycom vice president of strategic partners added that customers are looking for effective ways to communicate across their global enterprises, and they want communication to be as flexible, seamless and user-friendly as possible. Both BT and Polycom combine to offer a unique end-to-end voice and video solution that is standards-based and natively integrates with Microsoft’s UC platform. This solution gives customers easy access to powerful, productivity-enhancing tools, while protecting their existing and future UC investments.

VoiP Set to Change Face of Communication

The era of telecommunications is evolving so rapidly that newer technologies are displacing the old, transforming the way businesses and enterprises operate. As they grow and expand globally, voice communication over long distances becomes a costly affair. VoiP was developed in order to facilitate cost-effective voice communication to anywhere in the world. With everyone slowly veering towards this technology, it is bound to become the primary form of communications in the near future.

When compared to the good old telephone line, where local and international calls can cost quite a packet, VoiP wins hands down. As all you need is a high-speed broadband Internet connection, which most of us have these days, the cost will only be what you normally pay monthly for your Internet bill. The duration of the call doesn't in any way affect the cost.

That being so, is it any wonder then that VoiP is set to innovatively transform the way we communicate, and interact with each other? Let's take a closer look then and see how VoiP actually works.

VoiP actually stands for Voice over Internet Protocol and to understand what this means, one needs to comprehend the principle behind this technology. When a standard phone is used, analog-audio signals, the human voice, are transmitted over the closed circuit that make up the network.

VoiP systems however, convert these analog audio signals into digital signals and these signals come in the form of digitized packets of information that are transmitted over a high speed Internet connection. The amount of data that can be transmitted per second is more than 100 times the data that can be transmitted over standard PSTN lines.

There are basically three ways that VoIP calls can be made. Depending on their individual needs, users can adapt any method they choose to.

In the first method, a standard phone is plugged into an analog telephone adapter socket just as is done when it is plugged into a wall socket. This is connected to a computer and a software application is activated. This will allow phone calls to be made over the VoIP network.

IP phones look very much like the ordinary phones except that they use a different connector. Standard phones use RJ-11 connections, while IP phone use RJ-45 connectors. The latter is also used in Ethernet connections. VoIP calls can be made wherever there is a Wi-Fi hot spot or an Ethernet jack available, as the required software is already built in.

PC users can communicate with one another regardless of the distance. The only criteria is that the other person should also be a VoIP user, with the requisite software and a broadband Internet connection. The calls made are literally free of cost. A head-set with built-in headphones and a microphone are all that is needed to listen and talk.

Using VoIP networks, it has now become extremely easy for anyone to make cost-effective calls for personal or business use without any bulky hardware or initial expense. There are additional features like call forwarding, call tracing, reminders, caller ID that can be installed to enrich the communication experience.

Gear up then for a better tomorrow, where VoIP will become as common as making an ordinary phone call. PSTN may just be on its way out, but it will be sometime more before VoIP dominates the world of communication.

Mini Swamy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda

Cloud offers sophisticated telephony for SMEs

by Business Heroes

According to a recent article on SME Web, cloud computing is revolutionising the way that call centres are utilised by large companies, levelling the playing field for SMEs.

The article discusses the benefits of a cloud approach to telephony (cloud computing requires a shift from a traditional on-premise approach to hardware to a cloud-based external offering). The article explains how for SMEs this means that the purchase and maintenance of expensive telephony hardware is no longer required, therefore reducing the costs associated with owning hardware equipment. Another benefit for SMEs is that cloud-based solutions can offer enterprise business levels of service and professionalism, rarely a bad thing.

Read more about this news on the SME Web site.

SIP trunking: A primer

How connecting your IP PBX to a SIP trunk can save serious cash

By Brad Reed, Network World
July 12, 2010 12:00 AM ET

TDM trunks have long served to connect corporate PBXs to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). But with more companies moving to VoIP, SIP trunking has become an increasingly popular technology companies can use to simplify their network architecture and save money. Here are the basics:

Top five SIP trunking gotchas

Just what is SIP trunking?

Let's take it one part at a time. SIP refers to Session Initiation Protocol, the standard developed in the 1990s by the Internet Engineering Task Force that is used to set up and terminate VoIP calls and generate dial tone. A SIP trunk, then, is a broadband Internet link that utilizes SIP to connect a company's IP-based PBX to an Internet telephone service provider (ITSP). Instead of terminating the trunk directly at the IP-PBX, for security sake companies tend to terminate the trunks at a SIP-capable session border control system that acts as a firewall.

How does a SIP trunk save money?

By drastically consolidating and simplifying your voice architecture. SIP trunks can support voice, data and video all over IP, meaning a single trunk can replace multiple TDM trunks.

"If you have multiple offices and have a highly distributed network, you're probably going to have a lot of TDM trunking going into those organizations," says Michael Leo, the director of enterprise solutions marketing at Acme Packet. "With SIP trunking you can reduce your traditional amount of TDM connectivity by better utilizing connectivity across the board."

SIP trunking also makes it possible to add capacity during times of high call traffic. If you rely on T-1 lines, for instance, you have to purchase 24 channels even if you only use five of them at any given time. With SIP trunking, if your provider supports the capability, you just assign bandwidth to locations as needed to deal with high call volume. "Without SIP trunking you have to buy extra lines and pay for them all year whether you need them or not," says Nemertes Research analyst Irwin Lazar. "With SIP trunking you can burst call access during special times."

How much money can it save?

Lazar estimates that on average companies that adopt SIP trunking save 20% to 60% from what they pay now for TDM trunks. Citing one particularly dramatic case study, Leo from Acme Packet said he knows of one company that used 1,500 SIP trunks to replace 2,250 trunks, a shift that reduced telecom expenses from $5.4 million per year to $945,000 per year.

What questions should I ask a SIP trunk service provider before investing?

The big one is simply whether SIP trunks will be available for all your branches. As Leo notes, businesses with offices in rural or remote areas could have difficulty finding a vendor that covers all their locations: "As service providers ramped up they have addressed large metropolitan areas first. But when you get to more remote locations it's lagging behind. It's only been in the last two years that SIP trunking has become available to enterprises."

The second big question has to do with interoperability, as many SIP trunking providers will only support a limited number of vendors. In other words, some SIP trunk providers may only support session border controllers from Avaya while others might only support session border controllers from Cisco.

And finally, you'll want to ask about pricing schemes, both in terms of overall installation costs and flexibility to quickly and cheaply add capacity. Since SIP trunks are still a relatively new technology, they don't really have standardized pricing schemes and can vary widely in the services they provide.

"You'll definitely want to ask them how quickly they can get a SIP trunk up and running," says Anne Coulombe, an Avaya executive. "Some of the tier-two service providers are extremely rapid in being able to ramp up SIP trunks, while the big carriers are a little slower."

Finally, is there any business where a SIP trunk is not worth the investment?

SIP trunks provide the most efficiency for businesses that have multiple locations spread out over a wide area. If you only have one central location, or if you have offices that are located in a very concentrated geographic area, then a SIP trunk will probably not be worth your time.

"If you're a company that's already oriented toward TDM and most of your calls go between one or another town, then you might not need SIP trunking," Coulombe says. "So a pharmacy with only two branches might not need it, but if that pharmacy grew to have 15 branches then SIP trunking would be really worthwhile for them."

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Cisco Live 2010 attendee list hacked

Cisco notifies customers their registration info was compromised in security breach

By Tim Greene, Network World
July 08, 2010 04:31 PM ET

Someone hacked the list of attendees for the recent Cisco Live 2010 users' conference, a security breach that led Cisco to notify the customers as well as a broader group who have dealings with the company.

Cisco says it won't release details about where the data was stored or how it was breached but sometime last Thursday afternoon a vendor told Cisco that someone had made "an unexpected attempt to access attendee information through ciscolive2010.com," the event Web site.

Interesting Data about Data Breaches

That lead to the general notification that Cisco sent to attendees and others who had been invited but did not attend. According to Cisco, details about less than 20% of those on the list were compromised.

Cisco says the breach was closed quickly, "but not before some conference listings were accessed." The compromised information consisted of Cisco Live badge numbers, names, titles, company addresses and e-mail addresses. "No other information was available or accessed," according to the warning Cisco Live's event team sent via e-mail Thursday.

The same information is accessible to Cisco's World of Solutions partners, vendors that exhibit their technology collaborations with Cisco at public events.

Apparently the unexpected access attempt might have been made by someone who was actually authorized to access it, but Cisco isn't sure. "As we cannot yet confirm the information was accessed by an authorized Cisco Live partner, we encourage you to consider the appropriate precautions to protect against any unwanted email," the warning reads.

Others besides those who attended the conference also received the notification e-mail from the Cisco Live 2010 staff, including Network World blogger Larry Chaffin, who raises questions about implications of the breach.

Cisco says it has taken measures to lock down the data and has no more to say about it. "Due to security and privacy considerations, we do not plan to release additional details," a Cisco spokeswoman wrote in response to e-mailed questions about the data breach.

In general, if certain categories of data are compromised, businesses responsible for the integrity of the data must by law notify the people whose data was exposed. Cisco says this was not the case here. "No, we were not required to do so but felt it was our responsibility to inform impacted attendees as quickly as possible," the spokeswoman wrote in response to an e-mailed question.

This is the text of the notice Cisco sent to the Cisco Live 2010 attendee list and those who were invited but did not attend:

"We hope you have returned home safely and are back into your normal routine after a busy week at Cisco Live 2010.

"We are contacting you because on the final afternoon of Cisco Live, one of our vendors identified an unexpected attempt to access attendee information through ciscolive2010.com. The ability to access this information was quickly removed, but not before some conference listings were accessed.

"Cisco Live takes the security of attendee information very seriously and immediately elevated this matter to our chief security officer. His team completed a thorough review and as a result we believe your registration information -- specifically your Cisco Live badge number, name, title, company address and email address -- was accessed. No other information was available or accessed.

"Although these details are commonly accessed by our World of Solutions partners and often freely provided by Cisco Live attendees, we felt it was our responsibility to inform you as quickly as possible. As we cannot yet confirm the information was accessed by an authorized Cisco Live partner, we encourage you to consider the appropriate precautions to protect against any unwanted email. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that may result and feel free to contact us directly at support@ciscolive2010.com if you have any additional questions or information.

"We hope you enjoyed your Cisco Live experience and we look forward to welcoming you to Las Vegas in 2011.

"Regards,

"Cisco Live 2010 Team"