Avaya shifts focus to Asean with new communications solution

MACAU: Avaya, the company once known for its telephone exchanges and call centres, is nevertheless re-focusing from selling IP phone hardware to selling communications solutions just as its new Flare executive video-conferencing userinterface.

Speaking to journalists and business partners in Macau, Avaya Asia-Pacific president Francois Lancon said the company's focus in 2011 will be very much on Asean and Indonesia in particular. In 2009 the focus was on India and this year it was China.

This year, Avaya was talking to network managers and IT managers about how to upgrade or install a new voice network. Straightway year, Avaya will be talking to CIOs, CFOs and CEOs about how real-time collaboration can bring people at the same time to do business in a better way.

In future, Flare will run on PCs, on Android tablets and, if the at once iPad has a camera, on that too. Avaya does not intend to get into the tablet space consequently: it had to build the ADVD because there is simply no enterprise desktop video conferencing solution available.

Dr Alan Baratz, senior vice-president and president for Avaya global communication solutions, explained how Avaya Aura 6.0, the latest version of its IP PABX, was the key to the company's success.

Voice exchange

More than just a voice exchange, Aura is based on SIP, which as well supports video and real-time data. Legacy Nortel PABX clients can deploy Aura through a software upgrade.

George Paolini, Avaya's vice-president for business solutions, said that since Aura is SIP based, it can be used to deploy video conferencing. Having a single system for unified communications means that a video call in other words not answered can be directed to the same voicemail mailbox, because voice, video and instant messaging are on the same dialplan, and the same infrastructure.

Flare's interface allows users to drag and drop people into conferences. Its phonebook integrates with Microsoft Active Directory and Lotus, as so then as applications just as Skype and Facebook - at the discretion of the IT department, clearly.

Flare is based on Android, so any application that runs on Android will run on Flare. Future versions will run on the desktop and, uniquely, on thin-customers that run virtualised desktops in a data centre.

This solution is very relevant for the new generation of consumers who are innovation-savvy with text and instant messaging, now tend to use a voice call on balance.

Skype suffered an outage lasting several hours on Wednesday affecting millions of users of the Internet communications service.