Avaya is growing its portfolio of unified communications solutions today with new releases and new products.
The Avaya IP Office 9.0 release is Avaya’s latest iteration of its mid-market business collaboration platform. Mark Monday, VP and GM of Collaboration Platforms at Avaya, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that Avaya’s flagship enterprise collaboration platform is Aura, which can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users. For organizations with only 1,000 users, Aura is often too complex and loaded with unneeded features. This is where IP Office comes into play.
Monday explained that IP Office was built specifically for the mid-market and provides a lightweight and efficient collaboration platform. The new IP Office 9.0 release increases the scale of the platform to 2,000 users.
“Only 18 months ago, IP Office only supported a maximum of 384 users,” Monday said. “It’s not the intention to scale IP Office to 100,000 users, but we want to make sure that it covers the mid-market space.”
Aura Collaboration Environment
Avaya is also expanding its flagship Aura platform with a new collaboration environment. Monday explained that the Aura Collaboration environment is a new middleware platform that opens up an opportunity for developers and customers to write applications specific to customers needs.
“Collaboration Environment is a layer that goes on top of an Aura deployment. It is a separate server and it is virtualized,” Monday said. “It exposes a programming environment to the developer, and it’s also a runtime environment.”
Avaya already has multiple applications that can run on top of Aura, including the previously announced Flare application. Monday explained that Aura Collaboration provides yet another connection to those applications.
Monday added that Aura Collaboration will eventually expose a WebRTC (Real Time Communications) interface.
“So future clients could be written in WebRTC,” Monday said.
Avaya Messaging Service
Avaya is also launching a new cloud-based messaging service today to connect existing office desktop phones to SMS.
“This service enables an enterprise phone number to now be a textable phone number,” Monday explained. “So now I don’t have to give up my cellular phone number for texting purposes when it’s a business event.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
