Avaya outlines future roadmap

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Avaya has outlined its future roadmap following its acquisition of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions.

Speaking in a conference call today, Dr Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of Global Communications Solutions at Avaya, praised the work the two companies had done together after the $900 million deal was confirmed in late December.

“[This acquisition] brings together the best of the Nortel product portfolio with the best of Avaya [and we plan to] provide a smooth and cost effective path to the future,” said Baratz.

Top of the agenda was the future of unified communications solutions.

“Both teams had very similar views on what this future looks like,” said Baratz, “embodied in the notion that we believe there is going to be a move from the current integrated voice PBX solution to more open, flexible modular systems including voice, video and real time data.”

The plan for now is that existing Nortel customers can continue as they are but add on top of their current systems Avaya’s Aura platform, a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) product that the company claims will add more flexibility, lower costs and be a simple “plug and play” type adjustment to improve business applications.

Work that Nortel had carried out to create better APIs for such a system will also be incorporated.

Contact Centre technologies were next on the roadmap. Baratz said that SIP technology would be at the core with an open rules engine to correctly route calls and the conversion to all calls being conference style, allowing for extra devices or people to enter any conversation.

The Nortel Contact Centre 7 will still be the primary product for the mid-market but scalability will be added in when moving to Contact Centre 8.

“Over the next year will have implemented everything,” confirmed Baratz.

When it came to the the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market not a lot will change in the short term but Avaya still plans on making its IP Office product the flagship for this area.

“We are all really excited about how well we have been able to bring together the Nortel and Avaya portfolios,” Baratz concluded.

“Whilst we definitely overlap in a number of areas, we have different strengths within those portfolios and have been able to bring those together to accelerate our move to the future.”

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