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Avaya's new peer-to-peer SIP solution, dubbed one-X Quick Edition, certainly grabbed headlines this week, but users could end up drilling their own teeth if they're not careful. Quick Edition's predictability and availability could suffer because of its unique P2P networking.
One-X Quick Edition was part of Avaya's telecom blitzkrieg announced this week at the VoiceCon show. The technology provides Avaya with a valuable opportunity to expand beyond its enterprise base and address the burgeoning small-business market, the weakest of Avaya's three major technology sectors. The VoiceCon blitz saw Avaya fill critical holes in Communication Manager with version 3.1, while also setting the groundwork for a new approach to application integration, not to mention meeting the needs of the small office.
Communication Manager 3.1 improves Avaya's telephony server resiliency on two fronts. Avaya eliminated the need for a fiber link between two servers in a redundant configuration, relying on Ethernet instead. This move reduces hardware configuration costs and expands architecture choice. Instead of locating both servers within the same premises, the Communication Manager server can now be located on separate sites for higher availability. Cisco has long offered such a capability.
Avaya has also improved Communication Manager's ability to fail over active calls to a backup server by duplicating the IP Media Resource boards in each server. Security has also been improved through the support for Tripwire for Enterprise Linux 4.0, which will now be shipped with all Linux-based Avaya Media Servers.
Vendors are looking to embed VoIP within their enterprise applications to help change the way businesses use communications, and Avaya is no different. To those ends, Avaya upgraded its Avaya SIP Enablement Services, which exposes Avaya's presence server to the rest of presence-based communications over SIP. It also added the new Avaya Application Enablement Services, which delivers a Web services interface for developers to design new applications for a service-oriented architecture. Cisco has released its own SOA interface as well.
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