* News from GENBAND and Avaya
This week we’ll continue discussing news from last week’s CTIA and VoiceCon conferences. There were announcements from GENBAND on its Converged Gateway upgrades; from Avaya on its new Aura platform (and a related contact center solution); and from Acme Packet about a right-sized SBC for the smaller enterprise. In addition, Shoretel released mobile and desktop enhancements; and 8×8 introduced a new enterprise version of its hosted IP-PBX.
Concurrent with CTIA held last week in Las Vegas, GENBAND announced several feature additions to its G9™ Converged Gateway that help drive migration to all-IP next generation networks like LTE, the Long Term Evolution architecture for 4G wireless networks. The new features include support for IPv6, CDMA, and satellite networks, IP transcoding, and enterprise femtocells. Commenting on the news, Joe McGarvey, Principal Analyst with Current Analysis said “GENBAND’s continued investments and enhancements to its flagship G9 platform positions the company to play an increasing role in the ongoing migration of TDM networks to IP and in the normalization of traffic required at the intersections of disparate networks.”
At VoiceCon 2009, Avaya launched the Avaya Aura architectural platform designed to simplify and integrate communications across “multi-vendor, multi- location and multi-model businesses,” according to the company. Based on SIP, the Aura Session Manager is at the heart of the new approach. The Session Manager provides control of communications applications and systems by decoupling the applications from the network. In a prepared statement, Avaya President and CEO Kevin Kennedy said, “We’ve seen some organizations use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20% to 60%. With this new architecture, for the first time, the way we communicate is defined by the applications and the user, not the network.” The Avaya Aura will be available globally in May 2009.
Avaya also launched a new contact center solution that has advanced routing and self-service capabilities designed to simultaneously improve customer service and offer cost savings. Using the system, customers use the speech self-service to provide key information so they can get connected to the best available person. The “Intelligent Customer Routing” will be the first solution enabled by the new Avaya Aura platform.
Next time, we’ll continue with the announcements from Acme Packet and 8×8.
