Avaya creates unified communications bundles

Avaya is introducing four bundles of its gear at VoiceCon Orlando that are designed to address specific business needs: teleworkers, mobile workers, home call-center agents, small businesses. The company is also offering a bundle for branch offices for chain stores and banks.

The goal of the bundles is to bring together a combination of Avaya and third-party products and services to support business needs that are common to a broad range of businesses at a standard price, the company says. (Compare unified communications products.)

Avaya is among a host of companies making unified communications announcements at VoiceCon. 

The goal of the teleworking bundle, for instance, is to give workers at home all the phone features that employees have at a company site. So rather than use a home phone, they can have a PBX softphone extension in their home, for example. The package includes support for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server that enables click-to-call and other features.

The call center bundle for agents working at home is similar but includes integration with databases and telephone features unique to that setting, such as hunt groups and supervisor monitoring.

Similarly, the mobile worker bundle makes it possible for a range of mobile devices to connect to the corporate network securely by implementing Avaya’s one-X Mobile client on these machines. This gives the devices the capability to be extensions of the corporate network, making it easier to get to voice mail, reach colleagues within the company and use PBX features.

The small-business option is designed for businesses with less than 100 employees who occasionally work from home and extends desk phone features to their mobile devices. It also includes an option to support full-time teleworkers.

Avaya’s Intelligent Branch package comes in two forms, one for retail stores and one for banks. The retail bundle includes wireless devices for store personnel, call boxes customers can use to summon assistance, and devices store staff can use to find a person knowledgeable about customer queries.

The bank option blends a mix of products that bring customers in contact with bank staff that have the expertise they need but who are stationed at other branches or headquarters.

Avaya is also introducing Avaya Intelligent Presence Server which aggregates presence information from Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Exchange, IBM Sametime, Domino, Google Talk and other services.

With this aggregate presence information, rules in the server can make the information useful to co-workers who need to reach each other. Avaya has licensed Jabber XCP, the programmable presence platform, and added SIP Simple presence protocol suite and other collectors and publishers of presence information. The Intelligent Presence Server synthesizes the gathered data. The server is scheduled to be available in May.