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Avaya has reportedly unveiled a roadmap and vision for the future of communications.

 

The roadmap integrates products and services from the Nortel Enterprise Solutions to create a new standard for business communications. Avaya (News - Alert) provides unified communications, contact centers and related services to businesses and organizations.

 

Avaya's vision is based on open standards, communication-enabled business systems and effective, contextual, real-time communications. Organizations can make smooth transitions to new capabilities by using Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) while protecting existing communications investments.

 

According to Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of Global Communications Solutions at Avaya, the integrated roadmap supports Avaya's commitment to providing customers with the advanced communications capabilities needed to manage and grow their organizations.

 

The new roadmap builds on the existing Avaya portfolio with capabilities integrated from Nortel Enterprise Solutions. The centerpiece of Avaya’s unified communications portfolio is Avaya Aura, a SIP-based communication platform that unifies complex communications networks. The roadmap expands the value of Avaya Aura with the addition of Avaya Agile (News - Alert) Communications Environment (ACE). ACE uses Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services to facilitate the rapid development of communications enabled applications.

 

Avaya Aura is also at the centre of Avaya's contact centre portfolio. Thus, contact centers will move to a SIP-based, service-oriented architecture, simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. The integrated roadmap will seamlessly extend Avaya and Nortel Enterprise Solutions portfolio with capabilities for agent desktop, work assignment, experience management and analytics.

 

Roberta Mackintosh, director of global unified communications and collaboration marketing at Verizon (News - Alert) Business, said that the Avaya Aura platform is SIP certified to interoperate with the Verizon Business network. Avaya plays a key role in providing Verizon’s customers with advanced unified communications and collaborations solutions.

 

Avaya IP Office, BCM, Norstar, PARTNER and Integral 5 will remain for sale. Plans are also afoot to converge the platforms to the company's hybrid IP offering, IP Office. Avaya will also blend Nortel features, interfaces and phones with IP Office to create a richer solution with investment protection benefits. The company is also offering the Avaya Software Communication System for small and medium enterprise customers who want to manage unified communications from their data centre.

 

Avaya will be adopting the current roadmap of NES data products in its entirety. The new Avaya data portfolio offers significant advantages of 'Always-On' reliability, network efficiency and scalability to grow with customer's business needs. In addition, the Avaya data portfolio contains solutions for Ethernet Switching, Routers, Wireless Networking, Access Control and Unified Management.

 

According to John Black, president of Catalyst Telecom (News - Alert), the roadmap affords Avaya and Nortel dealers the flexibility to transition their end-user customers to the go-forward platforms. Moreover, Avaya Aura enables dealers to provide customers with the architecture to migrate over time without having to rip and replace their current solution.