Aura illuminates Avaya’s UC strategy
On March 30th announced a new unified communications architecture called Avaya Aura, which is part of Avaya’s VoiceCon keynote today. It offers SIP based session management where the application defines the relationship between a user and the network. Avaya claims the architecture will do three things: 1) unify companies UC architecture, 2) centralize applications orchestration and 3) decouple applications from the network. The goal of the platform is to lower a firm’s costs and minimize network complexity by enabling multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal communications. The architecture supports up to 250,000 business users and 25,000 locations. The announced products will be available globally in May of 2009.
While the new architecture is based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Avaya’s Terry Robinson pointed out some differences from others SIP products. Original SIP solutions focused on signaling. Aura uses SIP for application management and sequencing and as well as signally. Aura Session Manager can orchestrate communications applications and systems by decoupling applications from the network. As a result, services can be deployed to users based on what they need rather than being based on the capabilities of the local system to which they are connected.
Avaya Aura includes the following unified communications capabilities: Communications Manager, Presence Services, Application Enablement Services and Integrated Manager. While Application Enablement and the Integrated Manager remain the same, the communications manager and presence services were updated. Communication Manager has morphed into a feature server that allows Avaya's existing PBX platform to be exposed as SIP features and services coordinated by the Session Manager. Meanwhile, Avaya’s Presence Services, formerly known as Intelligent Presence Services, will federate presence from multiple sources and vendors. On a separate note, Avaya also launched a consulting practice to support Aura called Avaya Strategic Communications Consulting.
Cost savings was a big part of the announcement. Avaya states that savings can be gained by using centrally managed, enterprise wide dial plans and on-net calling, global least-cost routing and PSTN access from the most cost-effective location. The company said it has seen companies use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20 percent to 60 percent. Firms have told Lopez Research that they will not consider a new architecture unless it offers cost benefits within 12 months. Avaya provided several examples of firms gaining rapid cost reductions within the first year, including a 43 site financial firm that was saving $1 million per month telecom expense. Other potential cost savings can be gained by using the infrastructure to eliminate local application servers and optimize software licensing across the full breadth of the enterprise rather than for a single location.
But firms also need an infrastructure that extends beyond short-term savings to positioning them for growth. Avaya Aura aims to do this by allowing firms to create new applications and quickly extend them to users anywhere. Instead of basing app access on what is available at the employees’ location, Aura allows firms to map applications to individual employee profiles, regardless of the location, system or device to which they are connected.
Avaya’s Aura announcement picks up on two themes that are critical to customers in the short term, which are cost savings and building a unified architecture with multiple vendor components. The cost savings part is an obvious requirement of an announcement in today’s economy. Additionally, vendors are taking note of businesses desires to build a solution that leverages the products they own from numerous vendors. As a result, all UC vendors are touting openness and interoperability. With Aura, Avaya is attempting to put some meat behind the claim. Initially by using Aura helping firms integrate systems from Cisco, Nortel, Siemens into a single dial plan but also by building interoperability with certain aspects of other vendors UC application. For example, rich and federated presence services are required to be a viable unified communications solutions’ provider. With Aura, firms will be able to mix say the call features of Avaya with the presence information of another vendor’s product such as IBM’s Sametime.
Meanwhile the third aspect of the announcement speaks to a major change in how Avaya’s applications will be designed and reused. The overall software industry has been moving to service oriented architecture, Web 2.0 and mashups. Avaya’s new architecture aims to break its old method of tying the application or component to a specific piece of hardware. This architecture is an important part of Avaya’s evolution in creating reusable UC components that can be integrated with other applications and business processes. Overall, Avaya’s announcement demonstrates a strategy – not just a vision -- for unlocking the value of its communications software. Now obviously, the proof is in the pudding. I look forward to speaking to Avaya customers this week about the announcement.