Avaya's Aura a Cisco Killer?
By Matthew Nickasch on Tue, 05/12/09 - 1:54pm.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?
- About Considering Convergence
- Matthew Nickasch is an independent consultant and analyst in the IP communication and convergence fields. His current and previous consulting experience includes systems architecture, virtualization, telecommunications, and converged networks for the financial, education, and healthcare industries. In addition to his consulting responsibilities, he has been active in the research realm, recently publishing and presenting on topics including routing protocol security and ERP and transactional database auditing. While his interests include directory services and corporate compliance, Nickasch's focus is on converged networks and IP communications.
Most Discussed Posts
- Blog Roll
-
Network World, Inc
The Connected Enterprise