Avaya Communicating on All Fronts

A new set of products is aimed at making remote workers a part of the bigger picture. Avaya on March 17 will outline its most comprehensive set of unified communications products and services to date when it introduces at VoiceCon in Orlando, Fla., a new presence server, a multiprotocol UC client, a series of UC consulting services and six vertical UC systems aimed at specific types of workers. Avaya’s new Intelligent Presence Server is unique in its ability to integrate presence information from multiple sources, said Diane Shariff, director of UC at Avaya, in Milpitas, Calif. “You can see presence from other applications and from different states,” she said. “For example, if a call comes into the contact center and the agent doesn’t have the answer, enterprises can use presence capabilities to be able to find that right person based on [predefined] rules and then connect them with the customer.” The six new offerings, which Shariff said are priced at under $100 per employee, are designed specifically for teleworkers, mobile employees, home-based contact center agents, SMB (small and midsize business) employees, and employees at retail and bank branches. Nick Lippis, principal at Lippis Consulting in Hingham, Mass., said the server provides an architecture to link presence from multiple sources, such as Office Communications Server and Exchange from Microsoft, and Domino and Sametime from IBM, as well as public instant messaging services such as AIM and Google, allowing users to see who is available from within a single interface, rather than having to look at five different IM or UC clients. more>>>