Avaya CEO Giancarlo weighs in on application server, economic opportunities

Interim Avaya CEO Charles Giancarlo is winding down his tenure at the helm as the company narrows down a permanent replacement for former CEO Lou D'Ambrosio, who stepped down earlier this year for health reasons.

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Giancarlo hosted the company's annual analyst meeting last week at which he talked about a new SIP Application Server that could make it simpler for customers to integrate communications capabilities directly into corporate business applications. (Compare unified communications products.) The goal is for customers to be able to do the integration as well as independent software vendors.

The server is based on the carrier grade SIP Application Server acquired by Avaya when it bought Ubiquity Software last year. Avaya will also upgrade its endpoint software to support features that end users have become familiar with via consumer products such as cell phones.

During the conference, Giancarlo discussed these and other issues with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene.

What's the background on the SIP Application Server?

It's in beta now and will be available early next year. The SIP Application Server is a new set of capabilities built on a SIP engine that allows for very high scalability of communications systems - it's not just limited to voice systems. It's a completely open system so it lets third parties develop either SIP-based applications and/or endpoints and devices to be able to connect into the system both for use as well as control of the environment.

What will customers be able to do that they couldn't before?

It's a highly scalable environment so customers that are very large, not just tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, it will enable them to operate as a fully integrated enterprise. That had not been available before. It will give them great flexibility if they have a multi-vendor environment for their telephony and communications environment. It will allow them to do a much better job of integrating those different vendors into a coherent integrated communications environment.

So they'll be able to use their legacy equipment?

They'll not only have the legacy equipment but have the same dial plan, be able to have some level of feature transparency across those different vendors. It will also provide the ability to use unique new endpoints, whether they're mobile phones now tied in with SIP capability to a private dial plan in addition to their public dial plan. It will enable messaging to go to those devices. The same could be true for desktop applications and integration of SIP into those desktop applications so that if you place a phone call you might be able to share an application or data with that same user without having to go through some other call setup process for that application environment.

They'll be enabled via SIP, which is a standard, but will there be any APIs where you have an active partnership and license the API?

Indeed. Already today that SIP Application Server in the service provider space is being used with service provider applications provided on top of it for advanced functionality. As we introduce it into the enterprise world we're expecting some of the same capabilities to come about. But the early introduction is based mostly on our own applications on top of that. Generally it takes a bit longer before third parties get involved. They want to see some kind of installed base first before they develop. But it will be open, we will have developer toolkits available for it.