Anticipating that video will play an increasingly prominent role in enterprise communications, Avaya has unveiled a family of real-time enterprise video communication products and services.
Announced Wednesday, the new solutions are based on Avaya Aura, the firm's SIP-based unified communications architecture. Highlighting the announcement was Avaya Flare Experience, a collaboration of capabilities across not only video, but also voice and text. Flare has been developed on the Android operating system and offers users a "touch and swipe" interface that enables communications in different modes including message checking capability as well as the capability of receiving alerts and calendar appointments.
"To be fully productive, employees need to simply connect via easy-to-use, fully integrated video, voice and text capabilities," said Kevin Kennedy, Avaya's president and CEO, in a statement. "This is the heart of Avaya's people-centric approach to collaboration and the means to faster, better results with less effort and a lower total cost of ownership."
The ambitious solutions cover a wide area, ranging from personal desktops to multi-screen room systems, taking advantage of new technological breakthroughs to deliver high definition, low bandwidth video collaboration for more employees. The company said its new solutions can cut costs by two-thirds. Avaya is also reported to be planning to announce an Android-based tablet, too.
Kennedy said the employees and IT departments have been spending too much time juggling and managing siloed applications that dictate user behavior, so Avaya moved to streamline its collaborative processes.
Avaya set out to hurdle four common obstacles on the way to the new video-based collaborative solutions: high equipment and bandwidth costs, special room needs, disruption during videoconferencing sessions and, finally, lack of integration with other applications an data sources.
The Avaya Flare Experience features a central "spotlight" for following active and in-progress communications including drag-and-drop voice and video calling. Users also have access to a virtual "Rolodex". Android-based tools can be easily downloaded, too.
Leveraging Avaya's Aura 6.0 solutions, Avaya Flare Experience is sold with the Avaya Desktop Video Device (ADVD), although it will soon available on PCs, laptops, tablet PCs and smartphones. The ADVD has a large 11.6-inch HD touch screen with video and audio capabilities supported by 720-pixel camera and HD-quality voice capabilities.
The Flare environment is also supported by a brace of Avaya products including the company's 9600 Series Deskphones and its Collaboration Server. Services include Avaya Video Conferencing Solutions that range from desktop soft client solutions to the firm's videoconferencing manager 6.0.
The company has stepped up an aggressive drive into enterprise communications ever since it acquired Nortel Networks' Enterprise Solutions unit last year for $900 million. Avaya also beefed up its videoconferencing solutions this year by expanding its partnership with videoconferencing provider Polycom and Polycom's Open Collaboration Network strategy.
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