• Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment Debuts, Providing an Accelerated Path to Unified Communications
• Avaya Aura Applications now VMware Ready™; Brings High Reliability, Simplicity and Flexibility to Virtualised Collaboration Applications
• Avaya customer RealPage uses new Avaya solution to Virtualise UC Core, Speed Customer Service Deployments by up to 20%

Basking Ridge, New Jersey - Avaya today unveiled its new communications architecture for virtualised unified communications (UC) applications, Avaya Aura® Virtualized Environment (Avaya Aura VE), to help businesses accelerate mobile collaboration applications across their organisation. With Avaya Aura VE, businesses maintain the high reliability, simplicity and functionality of Avaya Aura – the company’s next-generation collaboration platform – while gaining flexible new options for deploying Avaya’s UC and customer service solutions in virtual architectures.

Avaya Aura VE applications are designated as VMware Ready™, which is VMware’s highest level of endorsement for virtualisation technologies. More companies are choosing virtualisation to reduce the complexity, equipment and costs of their IT operations. The critical next step is the virtualisation of unified communications, with 70 percent of companies planning to virtualise their UC applications, according to Nemertes Research[1].

Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment—combined with Avaya’s expertise in open, mobile collaboration—helps ensure that the reliability, quality and availability companies rely on in Avaya hardware-based environments get delivered into the virtualised world.  Key Avaya Aura VE features include:

• Redundancy and resiliency: All of the critical systems availability features of Avaya Aura’s server-based platform—including software duplication, redundant session controls for SIP access and a survivable core—are maintained in Avaya Aura VE, driving business continuity and risk reduction in virtualised environments. In addition, the solution integrates with VMware vCenter™ Server tools for diagnostics, provisioning and traffic management to further ensure and simplify unified communications continuity.
• A simplified, open path: With Avaya Aura VE, businesses continue to benefit from the same open standards approach driven by Avaya Aura. In addition, virtualisation allows businesses to easily expand UC functions and users without adding new equipment, and do so quickly by cutting deployment times from hours to minutes. Companies with VMware cloud infrastructure in their data centres can now integrate Avaya Aura applications onto their existing server environment, further simplifying UC virtualisation.
• Agile customer service operations: Avaya Aura extends virtualisation to its call centre application, Call Center Elite. With less equipment required, companies can add contact centre agents more swiftly and cost-effectively based on seasonal, sales and purchasing trends. This brings the unique ability to improve the oversight and delivery of customer service using virtualisation.

With today’s announcement, businesses also have several flexible options for enhanced mobility and collaboration. Businesses can choose full virtualisation with Avaya Aura VE or continue with the dedicated hardware approach already offered by Avaya Aura. They can also combine virtualised and dedicated servers for application deployment. As another option, Avaya Collaboration Pods for Avaya Aura VE will be offered as pre-packaged, all-in-one UC solutions for virtualised storage, computing and networking.[2]

Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment: Key Components
The Avaya Aura® platform is a next-generation solution for mobile collaboration, and is comprised of the following components, now available in virtualised versions:

• Avaya Aura Communication Manager is the open, highly-reliable and next-generation communications foundation for Avaya’s UC solutions.
• Avaya Session Manager provides a SIP based core communication architecture for on-demand access to collaboration services and applications.
• Avaya Application Enablement Services provides developer interfaces for both off-the-shelf and custom integrations with communica¬tions and business applications.
• Avaya Aura Presence Services delivers scalable, high performance presence aggregation service.
• Avaya Agile Communications Environment enables application integration with business communications processes.
• Avaya Aura Call Center Elite is part of the company’s contact centre suite, and the leading call-routing software for contact centres.

For more information on these Avaya Aura products visit here; For Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, visit here.

Quotes
“Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment helps us deliver collaboration and customer experience capabilities in a faster, more efficient way. We virtualised our entire core UC infrastructure, while retaining the continuity and resiliency required to keep a busy 1,400 employee company like ours operating in real-time.

“To ensure top-notch customer service, virtualised Aura also lets us ramp up contact centres quickly – up to 20 percent faster. This is great for seasonal spikes, when we need to add contact centre resources on the spot. We were able to set up a temporary 70-agent contact centre using no equipment, streamlining operations considerably. Avaya Aura VE is a major advancement for us and for Avaya customers, bringing Avaya’s speed, ease and reliability to the virtualised environment.”
-Joe McCorkle, Director, IT UC/Voice Services, RealPage, Inc. a leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and services for the rental housing industry

“As interest in virtualised solutions continues to expand, and organisations realise the benefits of the software defined datacentre, we see the shift of real-time collaboration applications using VMware solutions as a step forward. Having completed joint testing and validation of the Avaya Aura UC applications—and now releasing them as VMware Ready™ applications—we are delivering a strong combination to customers. Avaya and VMware will continue to work to meet customer needs for performance and reliability as more real-time collaboration applications are virtualised.”
-Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware

“Driven by a desire to reduce costs, improve flexibility, and enhance resiliency, more than 70 percent of companies are planning to virtualise their UC applications, leveraging the same infrastructure that supports other business critical applications. But before IT architects adopt UC virtualisation, they must ensure that available solutions can meet performance, management, and high availability requirements associated with traditional telephony platforms.
-Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director, UC and Collaboration, Nemertes Research

“Avaya recognises that any path to collaboration requires a platform that prioritises high reliability, functionality and flexibility. This is why we’ve seamlessly brought these benefits from Avaya Aura into virtualised environments. With Avaya’s UC applications now VMware Ready™ for virtualisation, our customers can travel a faster, more efficient route to next-generation collaboration.”
-Gary E. Barnett, senior vice president & general manager, Collaboration Platforms, Avaya

Additional Facts & Information:

• According to IDC, 75 percent of organisations said virtualisation is considered for the default build of new server hardware.[3]
• The top concern preventing companies from increasing virtualisation is reliability, according to V-Index, a virtualisation industry quarterly survey.[4]
• Avaya Aura VE will be included in Avaya’s current Triple 7 Promotion, which helps customers of the Avaya CS1000 platform move to an Avaya Aura solution.

VMware, VMware vCenter and VMware Ready are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

All trademarks identified by ®, TM, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. Avaya and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein.

[1] Nemertes Research 2012-13 Communications and Computing Benchmark.
[2] Avaya Collaboration Pods begins trials in 2013.
[3] IDC Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Enterprise Virtualization Software, 2011, doc #232074, December 2011.
[4] V-Index: Virtualization Penetration Rate in the Enterprise report ,Q3 and Q2 2011,  by Vanson Bourne market research.