As is the case with nearly all forms of enterprise IT, Unified Communications and collaboration are moving to the cloud.
Avaya today announced its latest cloud effort, the Collaborative Cloud for Cloud Service Providers. The effort leverages a number of innovative technologies to provide a differentiated multi-tenant communications experience.
Bruce MacVarish, director of product management for Avaya Cloud Solutions, explained to Enteprise Networking Planet that a key part of the solution is the Avaya Control Manager.
“Control Manager is an application we also deploy as part of our on-premise solutions and enables administrators to provision and manage the overall control over what resources, agents or individual departments have access to,” MacVarish said.
He added that Control Manager is now coming to the cloud, taking advantage of its ability to provide administrative segmentation on the platform. So now the Cloud Service Provider can setup a multi-tenant offering with multiple enterprises running off the same platform.
As such the Unified Communications as a Service offer from Avaya can run on one platform. MacVarish explained that while Avaya’s solutions can be run in virtualized environments, the Control Manager technology means that a service provider can also run on bare metal or within a virtual instance.
From a deployment scalability perspective, Avaya’s Aura Unified Communications platform, which is the backbone for the UC as a service offering is already a scalable platform, according to MacVarish.
The metering and billing of usage is also part of the Control Manager piece. MacVarish noted that there is a monitoring and tracking element that is included.
Security
While Avaya is helping those that want to move to the cloud, it hasn’t forgotten about its core enterprise user base. Last week, the company announced a new Session Border Controller physical appliance to help protect unified communications.
“The Avaya SBCE is essentially an IPS for Unified Communications,” Addis Hallmark, Technology Solutions Leader at Avaya, told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. ” Avaya has invested in years of UC threat research and provides inspection of all UC traffic even traffic at the application layer. ”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
