Open Network Featured Article

Technology Marketing Corp. has presented Avaya (News - Alert) with its 2016 SDN Product of the Year Award. The vendor received the accolade for the Avaya SDN Fx Healthcare solution. News of the win came shortly after Avaya announced plans to file for Chapter 11.

The SDN Fx Healthcare solution addresses the fact that there’s a need for secure IoT device mobility in healthcare environments such as hospitals. It does that by associating endpoint devices with an Open Networking Adapter that provides dynamic, automated connectivity. Avaya Open Networking Adapters are small elements that serve as a bridge between Ethernet-equipped devices and the network. They can transform any endpoint into an intelligent node.

They deliver mobility, and based on device identity, enable security services to be customized. Network presence of individual devices also can be tracked with this solution. And security and services policies related to the device stay with it throughout its lifecycle.

SDN Fx is the automated architecture associated with all of this. It has an automated control plane, allows for reduction of capex and opex, is scalable, and enables simplified multicast. It delivers business continuity features including higher availability; SLAs; visibility; a meshed architecture to eliminate a single point of failure; and one virtualized enterprise for the branch, campus, and data center. And it features centralized orchestration and management, compliance, elastic services enablement, hyper-segmentation, and invisible/stealth virtual networks.

"Recognizing leaders advancing SDN technologies, TMC (News - Alert) is proud to announce Avaya as a recipient of the 2016 SDN Product of the Year Award," said TMC CEO Rich Tehrani. "Avaya SDN Fx Healthcare and Avaya Open Network Adapters have demonstrated innovation and will help shape the face of this rapidly-evolving industry. It is our pleasure to honor Avaya for their inspiring work."

Avaya last year occupied the leader box in both the worldwide Contact Center Infrastructure, and Unified Communications Gartner (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant reports.

While Avaya’s leadership and product portfolio are generally considered to be solid, the company has been struggling under a heavy debt load. So it’s reorganizing to address that. Filing Chapter 11, analyst and INTERNET TELEPHONY columnist Phil Edholm recently commented, “was the right answer” for Avaya.