Avaya's announcement today that it will upgrade the small office capabilities in its peer-to-peer solution, addresses both the needs of its customers and provides a compelling alternative to Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs).
Prior to the release of Quick Edition for the branch office, Avaya required the deployment of a media gateway at the branch office. The G350 Media Gateway, for example, comes with the S8300 Media Server, a backup telephony sever that Avaya refers to as a Local Survivable Processor (LSP). The server prices in at roughly $5,800, about the same as Cisco's 2811 router with integrated voice capability, but still requires companies to purchase the routing and switching capabilities that Cisco provides with the 2811.
By adding SIP-trunking capabilities to its one-X Quick Edition, Avaya's provided its own easily deployed, economically priced, branch-office solution. With SIP-trunking, a one-X Quick Edition workgroup connects to an Avaya Communications Manager on a corporate site through a SIP session. Deployment should be very simple. The one-X Quick Edition solution takes about 10 minutes to install and doesn't require an IT professional on site.
Adding SIP capabilities also gives Avaya to sell the one-X Quick Edition through SIP-based service provide. One-X Quick Edition is available through Avaya resellers, as well as from BestBuy for Business, CDW and PC Zones.
The use of SIP trunking though could also introduce new problems for Avaya. Corporate VoIP deployments have long required careful evaluation of the underlying data infrastructure to insure its suitability for VoIP. Avaya first introduced Quick Edition initially avoided those issues to a large extent by avoiding IP trunks, the most critical part of the infrastructure. However, as with Siemens who introduced a similar peer-to-peer, SIP-based solution in Europe in March and then in May in the US, SIP trunking capabilities open the way for numerous quality of service issues.
