Avaya Adds Next-Gen Collaboration Capabilities to Aura

Taking its Aura platform further into the collaboration and contact center spaces, Avaya has released a slew of new applications designed to enhance the way companies communicate both inside and outside their four walls.

The UC vendor announced a whopping 12 new products aimed at the enterprise space and built to make unified communications an even more attractive option for companies looking to enhance or upgrade their communications infrastructure. All of the new offerings are designed to work with Avaya’s Aura platform, its flagship SIP-based communications platform.

“In today’s evolving business communications environment, companies demand the right technology approach to ensure superior experiences for employees and the customers they serve,” said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO of Avaya in a statement. “Avaya’s latest series of innovations accomplishes this through faster, more efficient orchestration of people and information.”

While the new products are too many to list, here are a few of the more important ones:

1. Avaya Aura Contact Center, a multimedia contact center application that incorporates voice, e-mail, web chat and instant messaging/SMS to help businesses more effectively manage customer experiences in an always-on world;

2. Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE) incorporates notification services through its Event Response Manager application, and enables developers to personalize communications through an included toolkit;

3. Avaya Aura Conferencing hosts video, audio and Web conferencing features on one server that reduces management and power requirements. The Standard Edition is available now, and the Enterprise Edition, available later this year, will have additional features including internal operator assistance, emergency blast dialing and more. Both editions integrate with UC applications from Avaya, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe; and

4. Avaya Aura Messaging is a Linux messaging solution that offers expanded choices for accessing and storing messages. The first release is uses many of the UI features of the Octel messaging system to help users migrate to the new platform and also includes speech-to-text and speech-based virtual assistants.

Avaya Aura and all of its applications work with Avaya’s recently announced data networking and network management products, providing an end-to-end communication solution.

At the very least, these new products fill out the Avaya portfolio, giving solution providers an even richer unified communications offering for their end user customers. Avaya has done much to ensure its Aura communication solution is a worthy offering, benefiting its customers and partners alike.