Avaya  announced the launch of a new era of business communications with Avaya Aura™, a breakthrough architecture that easily integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal businesses. Avaya Aura radically simplifies complex communications networks, reduces infrastructure costs and quickly delivers voice, video, messaging, presence, Web applications and more to employees anywhere. Avaya Aura will be available globally in May 2009.

The new architecture is anchored by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based, open standards Aura Session Manager, which centralizes communications control and application integration. Session Manager orchestrates a wide array of communications applications and systems by decoupling applications from the network. As a result, services can be deployed to users depending on what they need rather than by where they work or the capabilities of the system to which they are connected. Session Manager instantly reduces complexity and provides the foundation for broader unified communications strategies.

Avaya Aura is a cost saver in these difficult economic times. Businesses can leave existing multi-vendor equipment and applications in place and bring in the benefits and simplicity of Avaya Aura’s architecture to drive significant and rapid return on investment and with the promise of greater business agility in the future.

The technology now addresses a key concern of businesses: incorporating social media in an effective, business-driven capacity. Using Avaya Aura, enterprises will finally be able to securely incorporate consumer communication methods, i.e. social media such as Facebook and Twitter, Short Message Services and peer-to-peer communications. For example, a communication session could be augmented with a social network profile on the participants. To do so would provide more context than is available with current capabilities such as CallerID and presence that could boost the outcome and value of the session. Similarly, widgets to social network home pages can be added to facilitate real time communications and enrich customer service transactions.

“With Avaya Aura, organizations can achieve rapid returns on their business communications investment, while simplifying the development and deployment of applications that improve operational performance,” said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO, Avaya. “We’ve seen some organizations use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20 percent to 60 percent. With this new architecture, for the first time, the way we communicate is defined by the applications and the user, not the network.”

“Each step in the migration from TDM to IP communications has to deliver operational and business benefits in the face of dealing with a hodgepodge of legacy and new infrastructure” said Abner Germanow, director of Enterprise Comms Infrastructure Research at IDC. “The recession has turned the attraction of reducing communications complexity and cost into a business imperative.”
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