Avaya last week brought its top executives to Boston to give industry analysts an idea of where the company is going, a vision heavy on software advances and service-oriented architecture.
While Avaya has focused primarily on convergence in the five years since it was spun out of Lucent (Oct. 1 is the anniversary), the new focus is on intelligent communications, says Don Peterson, chairman and CEO. Wrapped up in this marketing pitch is the idea that IP telephony is simply a starting point that makes possible new voice-based applications that support business processes.
“You might have a workflow application that involves sending a document from A to B, then to C, but then ends up sitting in C’s in-box,” says CTO Mun-Yuen Leong. “The idea is to enable the system to realize the document has been in there for too long and consult presence information to figure out the best way to reach the individual and then notify them about the work.”
As evidence that others understand the value of building for this new environment, Peterson says the company now has 1,300 developers participating in its DeveloperConnection program, four times what it had last year.
The foundation for this future is SOA and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Peterson says.
SOA won’t be trotted out tomorrow, says Mike Thurk, group vice president of Global Communications Solutions. “This is a multi-year effort involving internal and external development.”
“Services” in Avaya’s SOA will include presence, call routing, call recording, the ability to generate alerts and collect data, etc. “We want to tear it all apart so customers can pull together the services that are best for their business, their vertical market,” Thurk says.
You can’t do that today without a lot of coding, adds Karyn Mashima, senior vice president of strategy and technology. “The future is about reusable components wrapped in a protocol that people understand.”
That’s where SIP comes in.
“SIP is important as the standard for the multi-modal world, the protocol that will be used to integrate components from different vendors,” Mashima says. SIP also supports two-way presence, making it ideal for many of the applications Avaya envisions.
She estimates that 30% of Avaya’s revenue today stems from software products, but 80% of the products in the works are software-based.
The trick will be achieving the transformation without losing too much ground to Cisco, which is neck-in-neck in the IP telephony game.
