Avaya Delivers Open, Mobile Collaboration on Virtualized Architecture

• Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment Debuts, Providing an Accelerated Path to Unified Communications 
• Avaya Aura Applications now VMware Ready™; Brings High Reliability, Simplicity and Flexibility to Virtualized Collaboration Applications
• Avaya customer RealPage uses new Avaya solution to Virtualize UC Core, Speed Customer Service Deployments by up to 20%

Thursday, December 6, 2012. Kuala Lumpur —Avaya today unveiled its new communications architecture for virtualized unified communications (UC) applications, Avaya Aura® Virtualized Environment (Avaya Aura VE), to help businesses accelerate mobile collaboration applications across their organization. With Avaya Aura VE, businesses maintain the high reliability, simplicity and functionality of Avaya Aura – the company’s next-generation collaboration platform – while gaining flexible new options for deploying Avaya’s UC and customer service solutions in virtual architectures.

Avaya Aura VE applications are designated as VMware Ready™, which is VMware’s highest level of endorsement for virtualization technologies. More companies are choosing virtualization to reduce the complexity, equipment and costs of their IT operations. The critical next step is the virtualization of unified communications, with 70 percent of companies planning to virtualize their UC applications, according to Nemertes Research .

Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment—combined with Avaya’s expertise in open, mobile collaboration—helps ensure that the reliability, quality and availability companies rely on in Avaya hardware-based environments get delivered into the virtualized world.  Key Avaya Aura VE features include:

• Redundancy and resiliency: All of the critical systems availability features of Avaya Aura’s server-based platform—including software duplication, redundant session controls for SIP access and a survivable core—are maintained in Avaya Aura VE, driving business continuity and reducing risk in virtualized environments. In addition, the solution integrates with VMware vCenter™ Server tools for diagnostics, provisioning and traffic management to further ensure and simplify unified communications continuity.
• A simplified, open path:  With Avaya Aura VE, businesses continue to benefit from the same open standards approach driven by Avaya Aura. In addition, virtualization allows businesses to easily expand UC functions and users without adding new equipment, and do so quickly by cutting deployment times from hours to minutes. Companies with VMware cloud infrastructure in their data centers can now easily integrate Avaya Aura applications onto their existing server environment.

• Agile customer service operations: Avaya Aura extends virtualization to its call center application, Call Center Elite. With less equipment required, companies can add contact center agents more swiftly and cost-effectively based on seasonal, sales and purchasing trends. This brings the unique ability to improve the oversight and delivery of customer service using virtualization.

With today’s announcement, businesses also have several flexible options for enhanced mobility and collaboration.  Businesses can choose full virtualization with Avaya Aura VE or continue with the dedicated hardware approach already offered by Avaya Aura. They can also combine virtualized and dedicated servers for application deployment. As another option, Avaya Collaboration Pods for Avaya Aura VE will be offered as pre-packaged, all-in-one UC solutions for virtualized storage, computing and networking.

Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment: Key Components
The Avaya Aura® platform is comprised of the following components, now available in virtualized versions:
--Avaya Aura Communication Manager is the open, highly-reliable and next-generation communications foundation for Avaya’s UC solutions.
--Avaya Session Manager provides a SIP based core communications architecture for on-demand access to collaboration services and applications.
--Avaya Application Enablement Services provides developer interfaces for both off-the-shelf and custom integrations with communica¬tions and business applications.
-- Avaya Aura Presence Services delivers scalable, high performance presence aggregation services.
--Avaya Agile Communications Environment enables application integration with business communications processes.
--Avaya Aura Call Center Elite is part of the company’s contact center suite, and the premier call-routing software for contact centers.

Quotes
“Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment helps us deliver collaboration and customer experience capabilities in a faster, more efficient way. We virtualized our core UC infrastructure, while retaining the continuity and resiliency required to keep a busy 1,400 employee company like ours operating in real-time.
“To ensure top-notch customer service, virtualized Aura lets us ramp up contact centers quickly – up to 20 percent faster. This is great for seasonal spikes, when we need to add resources on the spot. We were able to set up a temporary 70-agent contact center using no equipment, streamlining operations considerably. Avaya Aura VE is a major advancement for us and for Avaya customers, bringing Avaya’s speed, ease and reliability to the virtualized environment.”
--Joe McCorkle, director, IT UC/Voice Services, RealPage, Inc. a leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and services for the rental housing industry

“Avaya Aura® availability as a virtual appliance through VMware is great news for Avaya’s existing installed base, as they can now migrate to the newest version of Avaya Aura, including system redundancy, with minimal or no additional investment in hardware. Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment provides a flexible deployment model that enables a stepped roll-out of unified communications (UC) feature sets as per a customer’s specific collaboration needs and deployment plans. The solution enables businesses to deploy UC much faster than previously and supporting Avaya’s ACE™ as a virtualized application offers easy integration of business process applications across any platform.”
- Shailendra Soni, Industry Principal, APAC Enterprise Communications, Frost & Sullivan

  “As interest in virtualized solutions continues to expand, and organizations realize the benefits of the software-defined datacenter, we see the shift of real-time collaboration applications using VMware solutions as a step forward. Having completed joint testing and validation of the Avaya Aura UC applications—and now releasing them as VMware Ready™ applications—we are delivering a strong combination to customers. Avaya and VMware will continue to work to meet customer needs for performance and reliability as more real-time collaboration applications are virtualized.”
--Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware

“Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment helps us reach new levels of real-time collaboration quickly, easily and with a great deal of flexibility. In fact, using our existing virtualization infrastructure, it took no more than 1 hour to install, and we were able to make the transition seamlessly. End users remained productive, and with help from VMware’s vCenter, the solution is easier to manage, helping ensure a smooth path to virtualized UC.”
--Jayce Nguyen, Chief Information Technology Officer, Sun Ivy International Inc., Vietnam Representative Office

 “Avaya recognizes that any path to collaboration requires a platform that prioritizes high reliability, functionality and flexibility. This is why we’ve seamlessly brought these benefits from Avaya Aura into virtualized environments. With Avaya’s UC applications now VMware Ready™ for virtualization, our customers can travel a faster, more efficient route to next-generation collaboration.”
--Gary E. Barnett, senior vice president & general manager, Collaboration Platforms, Avaya