Avaya Releases New Aura Collaboration and Unified Communications Tool

Avaya today unveiled its new communications architecture for virtualized unified communications (UC) applications, Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment (Avaya Aura VE), to help businesses accelerate mobile collaboration applications across their organization.

With Avaya Aura VE, businesses gain new options for deploying Avaya's UC and customer service solutions in virtual architectures.

Key Avaya Aura VE features include the following:

• Redundancy and resiliency: All of the critical systems availability features of Avaya Aura's server-based platform-including software duplication, redundant session controls for SIP access and a survivable core-are maintained in Avaya Aura VE, driving business continuity and reducing risk in virtualized environments. In addition, the solution integrates with VMware vCenter Server tools for diagnostics, provisioning, and traffic management.
• A simplified, open path: With Avaya Aura VE, businesses continue to benefit from the same open-standards approach driven by Avaya Aura. In addition, virtualization allows businesses to expand UC functions and users without adding new equipment, and do so quickly by cutting deployment times from hours to minutes. Companies with VMware cloud infrastructure in their data centers can now integrate Avaya Aura applications onto their existing server environments.
• Agile customer service operations: Avaya Aura extends virtualization to its call center application, Call Center Elite. With less equipment required, companies can add contact center agents based on seasonal, sales, and purchasing trends. 

With today's announcement, businesses also have several flexible options for enhanced mobility and collaboration.  Businesses can choose full virtualization with Avaya Aura VE or continue with the dedicated hardware approach already offered by Avaya Aura. They can also combine virtualized and dedicated servers for application deployment. As another option, Avaya Collaboration Pods for Avaya Aura VE will be offered as pre-packaged, all-in-one UC solutions for virtualized storage, computing and networking.

The Avaya Aura platform is comprised of the following components, now available in virtualized versions:;

• Avaya Aura Communication Manager is the communications foundation for Avaya's UC solutions.
• Avaya Aura Session Manager provides a SIP based core communications architecture for on-demand access to collaboration services and applications.
• Avaya Aura Application Enablement Services provides developer interfaces for off-the-shelf and custom integrations with communica­tions and business applications.
• Avaya Aura Presence Services delivers scalable presence aggregation services.
• Avaya Agile Communications Environment enables application integration with business communications processes.
• Avaya Aura Call Center Elite call-routing software for contact centers.

"As interest in virtualized solutions continues to expand, and organizations realize the benefits of the software-defined datacenter, we see the shift of real-time collaboration applications using VMware solutions as a step forward. Having completed joint testing and validation of the Avaya Aura UC applications-and now releasing them as VMware Ready applications-we are delivering a strong combination to customers. Avaya and VMware will continue to work to meet customer needs for performance and reliability as more real-time collaboration applications are virtualized," said Parag Patel, vice president of global strategic alliances at VMware, in a statement.

"Avaya recognizes that any path to collaboration requires a platform that prioritizes high-reliability, functionality and flexibility. This is why we've seamlessly brought these benefits from Avaya Aura into virtualized environments. With Avaya's UC applications now VMware Ready for virtualization, our customers can travel a faster, more efficient route to next-generation collaboration," said Gary E. Barnett, senior vice president and general manager of collaboration platforms at Avaya, in the statement.

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