Avaya :: VoIP Biz-News.com

Number of results 25 for Avaya

23/01/2012 - Avaya sees more exec changes as channel partner boss steps down

Avaya, which is continuing to evolve its channel partner strategy, has announced Jeremy Butt, its worldwide channel vice president, will leave the company in March.

The UC vendor said Butt's job would be eliminated and said in a statement that Tom Mitchell, SVP and president of Avaya's Go to Market, would take over Butt's responsibilities.

"Jeremy is ready to take on a new challenge outside of Avaya, and we wish him the very best in his endeavors," a spokesperson said.

Butt joined Avaya from Motorola in 2008, and he has been integral in its transition toward the broader, partner-led sale of its full technology portfolio, including a stepped-up focus on contact center, unified communications and data networking by its roughly 1,800 U.S.-based solution providers.

Earlier this month, Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems and services, unveiled several other senior executive changes.

Marc Randall joined Avaya as SVP and GM for Avaya Networking, coming over from Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), where he had been VP and GM of Cisco Systems' Scalable Network Business Unit. Gary Barnett was named to lead Avaya Collaboration Infrastructure as SVP and GM. Brett Shockley will take on responsibility for Avaya Applications including the Contact Center and Unified Communications portfolios, as well as maintain oversight of Emerging Technology as senior vice president and general manager. Dr. Alan Baratz was named SVP for Corporate Development and Strategy.

For more:
- see this Microscope article

05/01/2012 - Study: UC delivers ROI, but customers still wary

A new study says that potential customers for unified communications continue to struggle to justify the expense of converting to a UC platform, and remain worried they won't see a return on their investment. The good news, according to International Data Corporation? Once a company commits to deploy a UC solution, the technology delivers.

IDC analyst Rich Costello, who wrote IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications Voice Infrastructure 2011-2012 Vendor Analysis, said educating potential customers is critical.

"It's an ongoing effort for customers to understand and identify appropriate business cases for UC and the overall complexities associated with it," he said. "But, once that connection is made, UC delivers."

Costello said UC vendors should continue to focus on developing incremental business use cases to build confidence among customers and drive investments in UC. Vendors and partners must also focus on the business case, and not just the technical aspects, of a fully integrated UC environment.

Costello said that for the segment to continue its growth, vendors need to help customers identify tools and features that are most appropriate for their organization, and which sources they should turn to for those selected features and tools, adding that a business case for UC has to include a mix of IT and business benefits.

He also pointed to vertical markets such as healthcare, education, financials and manufacturing as some of the most powerful UC customer success stories to emanate from business process flows.

IDC named Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Avaya in its "leaders" category among vendors, with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Siemens, NEC, IBM, and ShoreTel (Nasdaq: SHOR), recognized as "major players."

For more:
- see this release

14/11/2011 - Avaya says SIP growth leads to new revenue strategy

Avaya last week reminded attendees at its U.S./Gov Sales Leadership and Partner Conference that it has rolled out 60 products in the past year and a half, more than it has seen in the past 10 years. And, it said, more products are on the way, including plans to take its Flare collaboration platform to Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Android mobile devices, and to make its Aura Conferencing product more feature-rich.

Avaya, which has been gaining share on Cisco in the telephony equipment segment, has been reminding partners, in strong terms, that it wants them to focus more on its broader technology portfolio and on collaboration and user experience.

It's a revenue growth plan that it has been pitching at all of its recent channel partner conferences.

Alan Baratz, Avaya's SVP and president of Global Communications Solutions, says the push is predicated upon the continued growth of SIP technologies.

"The important and compelling thing about SIP is that it's all about sessions: it can carry the IP, it can carry video, it can carry IM, maybe other new types of traffic," he said. "It means you can have a single control infrastructure supporting all of that communication. That enables a lot of really compelling capabilities for the end customer," including cheaper infrastructure, and a more unified experience for the end user.

"Up until now, for Avaya, it really has been all about voice," Baratz said. "But now, on the same platform, we can do video, we can do web collaboration, we can do IM, everything, so we need to start investing in those other modes of communication. Video codecs become more important to us. Screen sharing becomes more important to us. It's really about the different types of communication and the technologies required to support those modes.

For more:
- see this CRN article

31/10/2011 - Avaya preaching 'user experience' over the underlying technology

Avaya is continuing to pour money into its "Power of We" initiative, working with channel partners to broaden and strengthen its push into collaboration solutions for businesses. The company is preaching that user experience needs to be its focus, because that, far more than the actual technology, is what concerns customers. Article

27/10/2011 - Avaya tells channel partners: We're a collaboration company now

Avaya laid down the law with channel partners at its annual retreat, telling them that it plans to transition away from its former focus on voice-only solutions, and warning that those partners that didn't change with it would be replaced.

"In the past if you sold a lot you'd get a favorable relationship and benefits from Avaya," said Joel Hackney, Avaya's senior vice-president of sales and marketing. "Going forward, we're changing that. Those who bring in the most value helping customers collaborate faster and smarter will have more financial rewards."

According to CDN, the company also plans to recruit more partners in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean.

"We're interested in recruiting new partners who are interested in bringing new value solutions in collaboration," said Hackney. "Many are making this transition from voice to collaboration and we want to invest in them to help bring them to the new world of collaboration."

Avaya said it has invested more heavily in its channel and direct sales and is in full partner recruitment mode since integrating Nortel more than a year ago. The company said it is now a collaboration company, not a phone or IT company. "The only remaining competitive advantage left in business today is finding that idea from an employee, hearing it, getting a team together fast and make a decision on it," he said.

For more:
- see this article

10/10/2011 - Cisco, Avaya hit different segments in PBX, IP PBX sales; SMBs are big customers for both

Avaya and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) are competing hard in the IP PBX and PBX market, but not likely head-to-head, said new research from Eastern Management Group. Instead, the two companies compete, generally, for a different tier of customer with different experience levels.

That "tiered competition" allowed Avaya to grow its North American market share 46 percent in 2010, while Cisco saw a corresponding 18 percent growth. The companies took share from competitors like NEC, Mitel (Nasdaq: MITL), Panasonic, Toshiba, Siemens and others.

Avaya, meanwhile, draws almost 40 percent of its sales from first time PBX and IP PBX buyers in the 50-75 employee market. Avaya and Panasonic see more first time buyers percentage-wise than do Cisco, NEC and ShoreTel. Cisco and NEC count on first-time buyers, which account for less than 20 percent of PBX and IP PBX sales. In the case of ShoreTel, the number is less than 10 percent.

Cisco, NEC and ShoreTel, in contrast, while also selling to SMBs with headcounts in the 50-75 range, are more likely to have their PBX and IP PBX products chosen from businesses wanting unified communications and collaboration features that improve employee productivity.

EMG said companies in the 50-75 employee range increasingly are driving PBX and IP PBX sales for systems between 25-150 stations. Almost half of all PBX and IP PBX sales worldwide are to smaller SMBs. Some 40 percent of those sales are to buyers of unified communications and collaboration PBX and IP PBXs for the purpose of improving employee productivity. First time buyers account for a quarter of all purchases in the study group, EMG found.

For more:
- see this Telecom Reseller post
- see this Eastern Management Group report

25/11/2010 - Unified Communications Market Has Strongest Quarter Since 2008

Dell'Oro Group reported that the Unified Communications market expanded to its highest level since 2008 in the third quarter this year. Strong second half seasonality helped offset weakness in Europe as the Unified Communications market expanded 7 percent sequentially.

18/11/2010 - Avaya Expands Business Collaboration for Small and Medium Enterprise Market

Avaya introduced the new version of Avaya IP Office—the company's flagship communications solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. According to the company, Avaya IP Office Release 6.1 delivers a host of business collaboration and customer service enhancements "that can improve ease-of-use and worker productivity for SME workers, and generate significant new efficiencies for businesses."

01/10/2010 - Avaya and Skype Team Up to to Collaborate on Unified Communications

Avaya and Skype have announced a strategic agreement to deliver communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes. The multi-phase deal includes both go-to-market and a joint technology integration.

30/09/2010 - Skype and Avaya team to unify their communications

Avaya and Skype announced yesterday that they were signing a strategic agreement to collaborate on unified communications (UC).

The first round of the deal involves deploying Skype Connect for Avaya customers allowing them to access the Skype calling features from their IP-based enterprise communication systems over SIP. Skype Connect will be accessible to companies using Avaya Aura--Avaya's UC system. The companies claim the move will save money for Avaya customers when they use Skype Connect to make calls internationally. Additionally, Skype's massive user base will be able to place Skype calls to Avaya's businesses customers for free or at a reduced rate.

In the second phase of the deal slated for late 2011, Avaya and Skype plan to roll out more integrated UC offerings to establish a federation between the two services. Customers from both companies will be able to engage in presence communications, instant messaging, voice and video. Consumers who use Skype regularly will be able to contact companies who use Avaya to handle any customer service issues within a powerful user experience.

The combination of technologies adds a level of legitimacy to Skype's business offerings by having Avaya's proven name secure the network communications and provide tracking, recording and regulatory compliance.

For more:
- read the release
- read FierceTelecom's coverage

20/09/2010 - Avaya CEO talks Flare tablet

Last week Avaya launched their tablet bomb in the war for the almost-portable unified communications (UC) device and this week the reactions are rolling in. To give us some more background on the device as well as the way Avaya perceives the competitive landscape, CEO Kevin Kennedy talked to PC World about the launch.

One key take away from the interview was Kennedy saying that "the consumer world cannot be bounded and [it's] coming into the enterprise." He makes this statement in relation to the iPad and the seeming loss of marketshare for the Microsoft-based world. As people in general become used to devices like the iPad, the demand and opportunity for new devices that could be used for UC within the enterprise grows. Avaya believes this is a good time to launch a new device that takes advantage of that momentum.

Additionally, although the tablet release is exciting, Kennedy and Avaya's real focus in on the Flare user experience which they believe will make workers super efficient. Kennedy explains how they've audited conference call scenarios where users use Flare to setup and administer conference calls. The old way involves everyone dialing into a bridge, people doing a roll call to make sure everyone is in the call, calling people who are, and then if people like lawyers are asked to step out and then later rejoin midcall, the whole process starts over again. Compared this rather regular experience with the new Flare experience, everyone knows who is on the call through the UI, people can be sequestered into a separate call for a few minutes with a quick swipe of the screen, and brought back into the call with another swipe. No roll calls, no beeps, no fumbling to find people. Kennedy's audits found the news system was sometimes 20 times faster!

It's amazing what a simple upgrade to UC and UI can do for a business process!

For more:
- read the whole interview at PC World

16/09/2010 - Avaya channel partner NACR has Sipera secure enterpise communication solutions

Sipera Systems has been on a tear of late making deals and securing the unified communications (UC) space. They just announced a deal with North American Communications Resource (NACR)--one of Avaya's largest channel partners providing end-to-end communication solutions.

The deal with Sipera means NACR will be able to provide enterprises with secured UC systems, as well as the ability to secure a variety of smartphones. Sipera's UC-Sec appliances find and fix security risks associated with UC that affect VoIP, instant messaging, IP video and collaboration tools.

"Our enterprise customers are eager to adopt UC systems and collaborative applications including VoIP, IM and IP video, but they are also aware that these communications must be secured," said Gina Odean, Director of Converged Solutions with NACR said in a release. "Working with Sipera, we can apply comprehensive UC and smartphone security solutions that deliver peace of mind, do not interrupt real-time communications, and extend enterprise security protocols across UC infrastructures down to any end point."

Recently Sipera's UC-Sec got the Common Criteria certification which is seen as a security standard for many large enterprises and government agencies.

For more:
- read the release

10/09/2010 - MZA: Avaya Continues to Lead PBX Market

The latest figures released by analyst firm MZA have shown that the Corded PBX market (excluding Micro PBX products) increased by 16% in Q2 2010 compared to Q2 2009 at a global level. Avaya continued to lead the world PBX market, growing market share from 13% in Q1 2010 to 15% in Q2 2010.

09/09/2010 - Analysts: Avaya holds edge over Cisco in global PBX market

When competition is heating up, mergers and acquisitions are sometimes what it takes to give your company the numbers to be the top dog. It looks like Avaya has done just that according to analyst firm MZA.

In the latest review of the numbers, Avaya hold a 15 percent share of the global PBX market while Cisco holds 12 percent. Avaya's edge according to MZA is their recent acquisition of Nortel.

Cisco still has the lead in the IP extensions market, beating Avaya 33 percent to 21 percent.

For more:
- read the No Jitter post

26/07/2010 - Avaya Labs working on mashup UC apps and some far out stuff

The power of unified communications (UC) is about having all of your contacts instantly at your fingertips with live updates on their availability status, location, skill sets and the ability to contact via phone, video, text, email, chat, or face-to-face if you ever feel the need to get up from your desk and do things the old fashioned way. With all this advancement, some of which is still way beyond what the regular corner office is capable of, it's fun to see where the industry might go from here.

If the final frontier out the real world is space, then 3D cyberspace might be the final frontier for UC. Avaya Labs is currently working on virtual reality collaboration apps--the very idea seems far fetched when you imagine the future press release for Avaya Aura 3D: now with HD video and life-like virtual conference room with force feedback. It actually does feel like you are sitting there with people across the country.

On a more realistic note, the company is also working on a product called Phone Mash which really taps into the practical aspects of UC. When you ring someone up for a business call within your UC system, all your previous conversations throughout the system--like over email--will be brought up on an easy-to-sort-through screen. The system will allow you to have relevant data and past details of conversations and agreements at your fingertips so that you are always on top of the state of conversation. The software seems like something that shouldn't be far off, so look for it and things like it in future UC launches.

Check out more of the innovations in Network World's article on the Avaya Lab.

For more:
- read the Network World post

22/07/2010 - Avaya adds to Aura with ACE 2.2 and Contact Center

This week Avaya announced a suite of new solutions based on the Avaya Aura system to aid customers in real-time, multimedia enterprise communications.

Particularly new to the list is the Avaya Aura Contact Center which is a new multimedia contact center application that extends to all types of media, including voice, e-mail, web chat, and instant messaging/SMS. It helps enhance customer service by allowing businesses to connect with customers over a variety of media seamlessly. The add-on contact center addition complements the large enterprise solutions of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite and will serve as a multimedia extension to Call Center Elite in the future.

They've also upgraded their Agile Communications Environment, an application that shows the promise of what UC is all about. ACE 2.2 now features the Event Response Manager which boosts business efficiency by automatically notifying the right people with the right skills to respond to emergency events like inventory shortages and security breaches.

For more on Avaya's announcements:

- read the release

01/07/2010 - HP continues Avaya UC deal

HP (NYSE: HPQ) has agreed to extend its partnership with Avaya--selling the company's unified communications (UC) products to its enterprise customers.

The partnership has been extended for another three years with HP agreeing to sell Avaya UC solutions to its customers. HP has also noted its plans to provide consulting and integration services on network design and UC setup to customers in support of selling Avaya UC products. Finally, HP will provide customers with Avaya's Aura unified communications hardware, software and applications as well as contact center solutions client applications and endpoint hardware.

This extension is just the latest in HP's UC empire. The company also has sales deals to sell UC products from Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT). Noticably absent from the deals is Cisco (NasdaqGS: CSCO), a company that no longer has a deal with HP and has a rather heated competition with them from what we can tell.

For more:
- read the article

26/04/2010 - Avaya Introduces New Products at Interop 2010

Avaya today at Interop 2010 unveiled new data products that are specifically designed to support the growing needs of today's bandwidth-hungry video and unified communications applications. These products address the main challenge that enterprises face today: how to cost-effectively add the bandwidth needed to position them for growth.

26/04/2010 - Avaya reveals new UC module and Gateway at Interop

There is no slowing down the advances in both unified communications (UC) offerings and SIP technology. Avaya's efforts are no exception, and they just put on display two new such offerings at the opening of the Interop trade show today.

The company has pulled the curtain open on the Configuration and Orchestration manager module for their unified communications suite. The module provides centralized configurations, provisioning and trouble shooting for an enterprise-wide array of devices.

Additionally, the company launched the Avaya Advanced Gateway 2330 which enables enterprises to extend centralized UC services to remote users. It combines a media gateway, SIP voice survivability, wide-area routing and security capabilities for remote branches of an enterprise. The gateway is interoperable with Avaya Aura and other SIP servers.

For more:
- read No Jitter's post
- read the release

15/04/2010 - Introducing the End User Spotlight

This week we are excited to bring a new feature to FierceVoIP. The End User Spotlight in the Feature section of the newsletter today is our attempt to bring you the unique perspectives of the companies who in the end take advantage of all the IP communication offerings our industry brings to market. By interviewing these companies about their recent product purchases and upgrades, we hope to glean some idea of what businesses are looking for when they bring on new VoIP, UC or other IP comm technology and what advantages and effeciencies they most appreciate once everything is up and running.

Today we're bringing you an interview with an executive from home appliance company Whirlpool. After recently acquiring Maytag, Whirlpool had the difficult task of integrating nine contact centers with approximately 1,900 agents on different customer service platforms into one system that could run efficiently. Using Avaya's contact center solution, Whirlpool added call-based routing, optimized call times and reduced costs by 12 percent in the first year and 10 percent in the second.

Don't miss our discussion in the Feature section below. In addition we welcome suggestions for future interviews whether you are a satisfied customer or you know one that has deployed an IP communications solution in the recent past. We'd love to hear from you and look forward to future installments of this feature. -Mike

15/04/2010 - End User Spotlight: Kathy Nelson, Whirlpool Corporation on Contact Centers

Back in January, Avaya announced that home appliance manufacturer Whirlpool had seen some great results after deploying their contact center solution to integrate nine contact centers into one system. We decided to chat with Kathy Nelson, vice president and general manager, Consumer & Appliance Care, Whirlpool Corporation, about her experience with the new solution. Nelson is in charge of Whirlpool North America's customer care strategy, which includes overseeing its customer service facilities, agent, technologies and programs. She also is accountable for the region's parts and accessory sales and warranty service.

FierceVoIP: Before going to this new contact center solution, how did Whirlpool manage their contact centers?
Nelson: All of our call centers were managed independently with each using different processes and limited synchronization among them. When we acquired Maytag in 2006, we needed to integrate nine contact centers with around 1,900 agents on different customer service platforms into one efficient system. The original Whirlpool contact centers were running on an Avaya platform, but the Maytag contact centers ran on an entirely different system.

FierceVoIP: What were some problems you encountered with the old way of handling your contact centers?
Nelson: Our contact centers are located in areas that can be hard-hit by bad weather and other disasters that made them vulnerable to outages. They were also susceptible to attendance, systems issues and call overflow, as well as inconsistencies in how we responded to consumer needs. We needed to eliminate repeat calls, transfers, and customer irritation/complaints from frequent transfers.

FierceVoIP: What made you decide to upgrade to a new solution?
Nelson: Because of our focus on meeting our customers' needs, we were looking for a solution that would help us improve the customer experience and better reflect our brands' promise to "build unmatched customer loyalty... one customer at a time," and do so in an efficient and effective way. Having one system across all of our contact centers would mean we could provide the most efficient service to our customers.

FierceVoIP: What about the solution you went with made you choose the way you did?
Nelson: We found the Avaya solution best met our needs. The most basic requirement for our customer experience center is continuity of service, and this Avaya solution enables us to feel confident about maintaining business continuity in several ways. It distributes our contact center to locations spanning the United States, which gives us a long 'service day' and the option to redirect calls in the event of a weather or other type of emergency at one location. It provides ease of management so that we can make emergency changes ourselves without a service call and, it enables us to have a large number of our most experienced agents working at home to take calls under almost any conditions.

FierceVoIP: Tell me more about how the contact center solution has allowed the company deal with weather disasters. What would have happened using your prior methods?
Nelson: It has helped us respond much more quickly and effectively than we would have been able to in the past. When a blizzard hit Michigan and a tornado occurred in Tennessee--two states where we have contact centers in--on the same day we were able to re-route calls to two other locations and our home-based agents. Without the Avaya system we would not have been able to respond nearly as quickly.

FierceVoIP: Since upgrading to the Avaya solution, what has changed from your old system and what are some of the improvements?
Nelson: In general we have seen productivity improvements and improved customer satisfaction scores. The ability to employ at home agents has been a big benefit, offering us more flexibility in our workforce, the ability to attract and retain good employees, and ensure a more consistent customer experience. Agents at home also generally have less absenteeism, fewer distractions, excellent quality scores, greater productivity, and a lower rate of attrition. They also have more "In and Available Time" over in-center agents. In addition, we have more space available at the contact center locations for future expansion.

From the management perspective, the contact center has moved from a cost center that many people considered a 'necessary evil' to a profit center that offers significant competitive advantage. We can provide active mining of customer data for our marketing and engineering groups with a broader set of customer and segment-focused metrics. We have moved from simple transaction management to customer relationship management that includes customer retention, satisfaction, and revenue.

Technology-wise, we have replaced our previous silos of systems with a much more sophisticated, integrated IT landscape that will grow with us as we continue to institute improvements.

FierceVoIP: Are there any other IP communications investments you are discussing/planning in the near future?
Nelson: We are always looking at systems and processes that will help Whirlpool provide a better consumer experience.

25/03/2010 - VoiceCon: A view from the show floor

VoiceCon was a great place to check out the competition's offerings. While cruising the show floor and meeting with a bunch of our industry's leading companies, I got to see a few unified communications offerings, video deployments and application development tools each with their own style and quirks as well as their shared capabilities that seem to be coming standard.

Some of the neat innovations I saw involved crossing device and communication borders. I saw Polycom's Conferencing call reminders that chase you from your desktop calendar and desk phone, to your smart phone or--if you are the event organizer--even automatically call you on your preferred number based on where the system knows you are. A few number presses over at the Nortel CVAS booth would move your desk phone call to your mobile. Siemens even built into their system the ability update your presence preferences from your Twitter feed--Tweet that you just landed in D.C. and OpenScape 2010 will update your presence making you available on your cellphone again and later on at your D.C. office phone once you arrive back at your computer.

On the video front, I saw Polycom use half the bandwidth to provide high profile video conferencing--showing some real promise for ways we can deploy video calling even with limited bandwidth. Cisco had a conference room on the show floor showing off their TelePresence system that puts life size people on a screen across the table from you as well as a shared video whiteboard. After a while you realize that the crisp images of live people are not only on the other side of table--and across the country--they are also looking back at you--the future of communications is not for the shy.

Although a lot of the action was user facing, a few companies were also worrying about building applications on the back end. In order for those unified communications (UC) offerings to chase users or automatically notify people within the system of meetings or calls, applications need to be developed to make it all work. Avaya's ACE, which was once part of the Nortel offering, now has the Avaya DevConnect developers making applications for UC deployments in programming languages regular hackers can understand. ADTRAN also showed off how their drag-and-drop development tools will help harness the power of UC for non-programmers.

All in all it was great seeing all the innovative pieces of our industry in action. What was your favorite part of the show? -Mike

17/03/2010 - VoiceCon Preview: Keeping up with Unified Communications

One of the main themes--if not the central theme--of VoiceCon is Unified Communications (UC). A recent study carried out about Frost & Sullivan--commissioned by Cisco and Verizon--found that collaboration tools like VoIP, instant messaging, and high-definition video meetings resulted in cost savings averaging four times the return on investment for firms using the IP platforms.

A recent finding from IDC claimed that mobile workers around the world will number 1.2 billion by the end of 2010--thanks to unified communications. Just last week, Avaya released a new version of its IP Office for small and medium enterprises with some new unified communications offerings including advanced collaboration tools using voice, instant messaging, presence and video collaboration using a softphone. Once just a big company play, increasingly UC is penetrating the smaller businesses as more and more affordable and scalable options arise.

With hosted UC services expected to "take off," with worldwide revenue doubling over the next four years according to Infonetics, it's no wonder Cisco is simplifying its licensing agreements, UC partnerships have arisen between major players and companies are launching products to help advance communications in the healthcare industry.

Apart from walking the show floor to see the various offerings for UC deployments out there, conference goers will have the chance to witness a number of discussions on the state of the UC markets and where we are going from here. On Monday participants can check out the Unified Communications Executive Forum featuring panelists from Cisco, Microsoft, Siemens, Interactive Intelligence, Avaya, IBM, VoiceCon, and UCStrategies. The Summit will look at how the UC market has evolved, issues facing buyers and sellers and integrating new UC technologies with old networks.

On Wednesday conference goers can continue the discussion with a number of the companies mentioned above and additionally Motorola and Mitel in the Unified Communications Leadership Round Table. In this discussion executives from UC vendors will discuss what technology is available now and what will be available in the next 12 months. Right after this discussion, Wainhouse Research hosts a talk comparing the hosted UC offerings of Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.

For more check out the VoiceCon event listings on Unified Communications...

17/03/2010 - VoiceCon Preview: Exploring and Optimizing IP comm

Today's issue of FierceVoIP serves as a preview of the upcoming VoiceCon conference on March 22-25 which we hope will provide you with some starting points to navigate the show. Print it out, put it in your carry-on and review it on the plane on your way down to Orlando. Hopefully we will give you a few things to think about on the way and some ideas of what you might like to see or hear about in terms of booths on the show floor, discussion panels, break-out sessions, deep dives and keynote speakers.

Next week's VoiceCon conference has two focuses for its attendees comparing various IP communications platforms and customers getting the most out of the systems they've deployed. A recent report "US Business VoIP Overview: Optimization Trumps Expansion" from Research and Markets says that by 2013, 79 percent of businesses will have deployed VoIP in some fashion. According to that report, the focus of our industry will be on optimizing those systems and that is exactly what attendees at VoiceCon will be looking at.

Last year we found interoperability, telepresence, cloud computing and media phones to be some of the hot topics at the show. This year some of these trends continue and merge as the discussions become more nuanced. As telepresence becomes more widespread and in demand, how do enterprises move from interoperability within to interoperability with outside companies? Media phones tied to the desk are on the verge of being replaced with a mobility focus, moving UC software to the mobile phone and applying our IP comm advancements to further support the mobile workforce. Attending the show, participants will get to explore some key areas in the deployment and optimization of IP communications like Unified Communications, Video offerings and mobility. Conference attendees will have an opportunity to see some of the latest advances in these fields while watching some of the keynotes from Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft should give them a clear indication of where some of the bigger companies are going.

Read on to see some of our topic highlights as well as our preview of the conference schedule and some helpful links to help you navigate the show. Perhaps we will see you next week outside the press room or wandering the show floor! -Mike

10/03/2010 - Avaya and Polycom to develop video and voice offering

Avaya is known for its Aura IP communications platform. Polycom is known for its telepresence, video and voice expertise. Together they are combining their two offerings for complete unified communications (UC) solution. The two companies plan to come together and market fully integrated, end-to-end UC solutions that use the Avaya Aura SIP-based platform and the Polycom Open Collaboration Network strategy.

Using the Aura platform as the control base for a full range of Polycom's voice and video systems, the new offering will ease the transition for companies looking to get into UC but find system requirements and interoperability issues daunting.

For more:
- read the release