Avaya revamps Contact Centre with Nortel

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The fruits of Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel are being reaped with a vengeance, as it has announced a suite of 10 products handling customer service and collaboration.

Avaya has been relatively quiet since the completion of the Nortel deal at the end of 2009. Beneath this calm surface, however, its development teams have been enhancing existing products, adapting Nortel technology and adding a few extra twists.

The result is an integrated raft of products for Contact Centre (CC) and Unified Communications (UC) based on the Avaya Aura architecture.

The key component is Aura Contact Centre which, the company says, reflects the always-on nature of modern businesses and the numerous communications channels customers want to use. Voice, e-mail, web chat, instant messaging and SMS texting are all supported.

It is designed to complement existing products, such as Call Centre Elite, and will add multimedia extensions to Call Centre Elite in the future.

Incorporated within Contact Centre is a WorkForce Optimisation tool, offering call recording, quality monitoring and work force management for staff training and development.

Communication Environment (ACE) handles workflows and incorporates Event Response Manager. This is a new product that automatically notifies staff with the right skills to deal with unexpected events, such as inventory shortages and security breaches.

Avaya Aura Conferencing is appearing in its Standard Edition to provide audio, video and web conferencing on a single server. Later this year a more capable Enterprise Edition will be released to enable features such as internal operator assistance and emergency blast dialling.

Both editions can be integrated with UC applications from Microsoft, IBM and Adobe.

It is important to know who is available when handling a customer call and Presence Services offers a native instant messaging environment to provide federated presence for IBM Lotus Sametime, and IM and Presence across Microsoft, IBM, Avaya one-X Communicator, Avaya one-X Agent and Avaya 9600 SIP phones.

To complement this, Session Manager has been enhanced to handle over 100,000 users, including 50,000 SIP phones and video capable endpoints.

Other products in the suite encompass IP-connected communications, an overall management suite to allow centralised remote administration, a virtualisation platform to reduce and optimise hardware requirements, plus a range of phones.

The new products will start rolling out from the end of this month.

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