The ability for organizations to communicate in multi-vendor, multi-site environments with ease and flexibility is essential. The direction of the convergence marketplace has proven that solutions designed around proprietary and single-system solutions are quickly becoming extinct.
In late March, Avaya launched a new communications architecture strategy named Avaya Aura. Available globally by the end of this May, Avaya's forward-thinking strategy combines "voice, video, messaging, presence, Web applications and more to employees anywhere".
Strategizing around SIP, Avaya has scaled the Aura product to support the demanding needs of large corporations to small branch offices. From a recent Avaya press release, here are some interesting details about the new product suite:
Avaya Aura is a cost saver in these difficult economic times. Businesses can leave existing multi-vendor equipment and applications in place and bring in the benefits and simplicity of Avaya Aura's architecture to drive significant and rapid return on investment and with the promise of greater business agility in the future.
"With Avaya Aura, organizations can achieve rapid returns on their business communications investment, while simplifying the development and deployment of applications that improve operational performance," said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO, Avaya. "We've seen some organizations use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20 percent to 60 percent. With this new architecture, for the first time, the way we communicate is defined by the applications and the user, not the network."
Squarely aimed at Cisco's Unified Communications product architecture, Avaya's strong focus towards SIP and interoperability are significant advantages to note, especially for enterprises looking to shed costs.
While only time will tell, do you believe that Avaya's UC product strategy will create even more competition for Cisco? Why or why not?
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Avaya Aura
The timing is right for Aura specifically Session Manager. SIP trunking is a definite cost savings opportunity that we experieinced using Avaya's first generation SIP solution - SES. Really looking forward to Session Manager.
Kevin Kennedy's past
Kevin Kennedy's past performance at JDS Uniphase and Cisco leaves a lot to be desired. Expect a bit of hype followed by a slow fizzle for this marketecture and this company!
Cisco will be dead soon and AVAYA will kill them!!!! LMAO!!
Let's look at facts. Cisco has $30B cash, all the profit in this market, all the R&D spend in this market and a deep understanding and leadership in Internet Protocol - where the whole market - Unified Comm, DataCenter, servers, phys sec, video, building controls... is headed. And you expect people to believe that Avaya with one product can compete with that? Provocative statement but that's about it.
Avaya will wind up just like Nortel and then Cisco will fight the real fight with MSFT, GOOG, HP... Avaya wont even be a bump in the road for Cisco.
Yeah...
"Avaya wont even be a bump in the road for Cisco."
Because this has proven true in the past, hasn't it? :)
Whatever you say
Enterprise customers are not interested in proprietary, all their eggs in one basket, single vendor lock in arrangments which is what Cisco is all about. Avaya is feature rich and vendor agnostic. This proves even more that they will continue to be the leader in voice communications. Cisco can keep their data switching and routing over how many different IOS's now??????
The Point is Business Efficiency
I like Avaya's approach (and it doesn't have much to do with the economy) The point is delivering value, not who owns market share. Cisco killer is a strong title and obviously meant to get attention, but that aside, let's not forget the real reason for this technology...to improve business efficiency. Only then can companies truly compete and begin rebuild the economy.
Avaya Aura
Being a current Avaya SES customer, I can tell you it has provided a clear benefit. It is all about ROI and cost cutting at the moment. If Aura delivers, it may truely be the Cisco killer.
Avaya Aura
By the mere fact that Cisco focuses on Avaya, has brought on a large number of their employees and imitates some of their product set indicates Avaya is more than a "bump in the road" for Cisco. Granted they do have deep pockets but we all know marketshare and best in breed do not always go hand in hand.
Avaya has never been easy or open.
I haven't seen everything, but this is not OCS and I don't think Avaya really wants to take on MS anyway. It is an overlay that ties all their systems together as well as industry standard SIP devices. Seems like a great idea until you pull back the sheets and see it is just more complexity and cost. I don't really see where it fits and doesn't change the fact that Avaya's biggest asset is momentum and they seem to be losing speed (no one really knows since they went private, but that certainly was the trend when their financials were public and the rumors about continuous layoffs certainly don't indicate that they have had a dramatic turn-around). The real question is how long can Avaya rely on selling to their dwindling base?
Avaya
Avaya has a wonderful market opportunity and should succeed over time; there is a real need for the solution. The only other alternative at a much lower cost is offered by Vividas, a company which provides large scale distribution of live or pre recorded full screen video over an existing corporate network using existing web servers, a much cheaper and quicker solution.
Post new comment