Avaya's Plan: Migrate Nortel Customers to Aura SIP-Based UC Platform

Putting to rest any fears about what the acquisition of Nortel’s assets will mean for hundreds and thousands of users, Avaya (News - Alert) today unveiled a roadmap that details how it will integrate the products and services from the recently acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions unit to create a new standard for business communications.

Avaya will speak in greater during this week’s ITEXPO show in Miami, held Jan. 20-22, about its new roadmap, and what it means to customers, resellers, carriers or developers.

“We’re talking about two worlds coming together,” Lawrence Byrd, director of UC architecture for Basking Ridge, N.J.-based Avaya told TMCnet. “The roadmap is not about ‘A’ versus ‘B.’ It’s about ‘C.’ ”

 

For the past year, that “C” has symbolized the emergence of an open-standards, enterprise-SIP architecture. In March 2009, Avaya unveiled the first fruit of its labors –Avaya Aura – aimed at next-generation communications for enterprises.

 

 

In further building a “better Avaya Aura” -- a SIP-based communication platform that unifies complex communications networks -- Byrd told TMCnet it will not use a “rip and replace” strategy. Instead, it will fuse the best technologies from Nortel with its own presence/messaging technologies.

 

“We have all these customers and all these systems and we have to merge them together,” said Byrd, adding that roughly 6,000 employees of Nortel’s (News - Alert) have been fully integrated into Avaya.

 

Detailed within the larger roadmap are Avaya’s plans for growing its unified communications, contact center and other core businesses.

 

As Avaya Aura comprises the centerpiece of Avaya’s UC portfolio with its proven abilities to reduce infrastructure costs and easily deploy centralized collaboration and customer service applications, it provides a natural upgrade path for all existing Nortel voice and UC customers.

 

The next level of Avaya Aura, therefore, will benefit from Avaya (formerly Nortel) Agile (News - Alert) Communications Environment technology. ACE uses service-oriented architecture and Web services to facilitate the rapid development of communications enabled applications.

 

Avaya Aura will also be at the center of Avaya’s contact center portfolio. With this foundation, contact centers will move to a SIP-based, service-oriented architecture, simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. The new contact center solution will be based on a new and collaborative work assignment model that will connect customers, agents and information. The new capabilities will help businesses and organizations to stay ahead of growing customer care demands for tighter integration and lower costs.

 

“The integrated roadmap we’re outlining today supports Avaya’s commitment to providing customers with the advanced communications capabilities they need to manage and grow their organizations,” said Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president, Global Communications Solutions, Avaya, in a press release. “In developing the portfolio, our guiding principle was to deliver the most compelling and cost-effective systems and services to customers and partners.”