Two product announcements in the news today: Avaya has extended its contact center portfolio to midsize businesses, and ShoreTel has updated its software to enable a mix and match of dedicated and virtual UC options.
Avaya announced the Avaya IP Office Contact Center offering multichannel contact center functionality to midsize businesses. The solution is purpose-built for the Avaya IP Office platform for contact centers with 5 -100 agents.
Avaya IP Office Contact Center features include: support for multichannel inbound and outbound contacts (voice, email, chat); an agent interface to rapidly access to customer information; Call recording for every agent and flexible reporting; and flexible deployment options using a dedicated server or in a virtualized environment.
Avaya IP Office Contact Center will be available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India on February 28, 2014.
ShoreTel’s latest release, ShoreTel 14.2 offers greater flexibility for customers with the ability to mix and match hardware-based and virtual appliances in a single network, offering the potential for savings based on network requirements. ShoreTel 14.2 supports ShoreTel UC components, including call control, SIP trunks, and collaboration applications. The new software supports greater scalability by quadrupling the port capacity per appliance: ShoreTel virtual switches can now support up to 1,000 phones and 500 SIP trunks.
In its announcement, ShoreTel noted that according to VMware, “server virtualization delivers 80% greater utilization of server resources, up to 50% savings in capital and operating costs, and a 10:1 or better server consolidation ratio.”
Commenting in a statement on the update, Pej Roshan, vice president of product management at ShoreTel said, “Virtualization complements our distributed architecture and allows customers to benefit from virtualization features and ShoreTel’s inherent N+1 redundancy to deliver high availability at the lowest cost.”