VoiceCon: Avaya, Cisco show off their ‘best-in-show’ products

Today’s we’ll offer some exhibitor highlights from the VoiceCon Spring event held earlier this month in Florida.

First, let’s start by asking which company won the “best in show” award. Actually, we should say which TWO companies won because this year the results ended up in a tie for the winner. Both Avaya and Cisco were named as the co-recipients of the Best in VoiceCon award. In a statement, show organizers said: “Both companies received an equal amount of votes, which were submitted by attendees on the VoiceCon Spring 2006 exhibition floor after visiting exhibitors’ booths. Avaya was awarded this honor for the Avaya one-X Quick Edition, while Cisco won for the company’s submission of the Cisco Unified Communications System.”

In its statement, Avaya noted that the “Avaya one-X Quick Edition is a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based peer-to-peer solution that is simple to set up and use. All the software is in the phone.” To use the system, users “simply plug the Avaya IP phones into the LAN. The phones automatically ‘discover’ each other, start-up their features, and provide back-up for one another. In minutes, users have access to the most commonly used telephony applications, including voicemail, conferencing and auto-attendant. As an office grows, new employees can be added to the system by simply adding a new phone.” The full release can be found here.

Cisco’s winning offer was its recently announced Unified Communication System. In its statement, Cisco says its system includes:

*Cisco Unified Personal Communicator: a GUI that “makes it easy to move through multiple communications applications.”

* Cisco Unified Presence Server “can help users connect with colleagues more efficiently by determining the most effective method of communication.”

* Customer Interaction Analyzer, designed to “maximize effective communications with customers, a new approach to analytics in the contact center. It uses information from customer interactions, including self service and agent assisted interactions, to determine things like customer distress, agent distress, silence and word patterns.”

Next week, we’ll highlight a few other announcements from other exhibitors that caught our attention.

* For Network World’s complete VoiceCon coverage, click here.