The Lippis Report

By Avaya

To succeed in a tough marketplace, small businesses must be accessible, without significant interruption, even in the most adverse situations. This kind of ongoing accessibility is an important aspect of business continuity — a critical success strategy that doesn’t just happen, but requires proactive planning. Although there are several aspects to a business continuity plan, a major component of any plan should be the SME’s communications capabilities, not just its equipment or data. This paper will explore how different kinds of interruptions can adversely affect an SME’s business continuity and illustrate how, through advanced features such as resiliency and mobility, Avaya’s IP Office can help SMEs overcome interruptions and maintain business continuity.

Find out how by downloading this paper here.

By IDC

This IDC Flash examines Avaya’s January 19, 2010, announcement of the road map for integration of Nortel into the Avaya portfolio of products and services. Avaya’s customers, and more especially those from Nortel Enterprise Solutions, have been anxiously — and in some cases fearfully — awaiting Avaya’s integration plans of the Nortel assets it purchased. To customers’ delight, Avaya has quickly laid out a comprehensive investment protection plan for legacy Nortel customers that ensures six years of support following any end-of-sale product. Its road map is consistent and clearly defined for each of its four business units (Unified Communications [UC], Contact Center, SME, and Data) as well as its services organization. The swiftness of completing these tasks, while necessary, is commendable and demonstrates to the market that Avaya’s “Protect, Extend, Grow” strategy is not a bait and switch tactic. The three-pronged approach is open standards driven and strives to allow customers on any legacy equipment — Nortel or otherwise — to evolve at their own pace.

Download IDC’s take on the Avaya roadmaps here.

Nick Lippis will be keynoting the AT&T and Avaya “No Pain, All Gain: Migrate to IP Telephony on Your Terms and Save Money” small business webinar on January 27th at 1:00 pm ET. You can find out more about this webinar and register for it here.

Hope to see you there and bring your questions about unified communication in the Small to Medium sized Enterprise!

By Rony Kay, Ph.D. President/CTO cPacket Networks

Low latency networks for distributed applications have become a competitive advantage for financial institutions with algorithmic trading platforms, where delay in trades impacts profits. The latency requirements for applications like high frequency trading, derivative pricing, and latency arbitrage are much stricter than for traditional web applications, such as VoIP and network gaming. While traditional applications can tolerate more than 100 milliseconds of one-way packet latency, algorithmic trading is sensitive to milliseconds, microseconds, or less. Market demand for ultra low latency networking is growing rapidly and the time resolution scale has shifted by several orders of magnitude from milliseconds to microseconds and less. This paper describes methods for meeting these more stringent performance constraints with finer resolution and more accurate measurements of latency and jitter than ever before.

Find out how by downloading this paper.

By IDC

Virtualization and UC application migration onto the datacenter are happening side by side and create an interesting and challenging dilemma. Virtualization today is primarily being applied to traditional server-based applications with flexible minimum response times, low utilization rates, and low input/output requirements. The requirements are quite the opposite for real-time communications where application delay is not permitted. A disadvantage of virtualization has been that application efficiencies can be lost as the virtual machine accesses the hardware indirectly. This IDC white paper addresses the question: Can virtualization support real-time communications?

Find the answer by downloading this white paper.

Avaya Aura is being extended to the mid sized enterprise market by simplifying its packaging into a single server solution loaded with unified communications and contact center applications. The Mid Market is typically characterized as 100 to 250 employees with revenues of $50M to $1B dollars. These Line of Business (LoB) managers seek to increase revenue and improve customer experience while differentiating against larger competitors. Their IT issues include older and dead ended communication technologies, limited IT and contact center agent staff and the need to rapidly reduce cost. To make LoB and IT ends meet, the Avaya Aura solution for Mid-Size Enterprises is offered for businesses with up to 2,400 users and 250 locations. Bruce Mazza Director of Unified Communications Market Solutions for Avaya joins me to discuss the mid enterprise market challenge.

By Avaya

There has been a growing recognition about the critical importance of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. This is a decade marked by catastrophic natural disasters and man-made disruptions such as terrorist events. It’s also a decade where we have seen the impact on business of less publicized, yet significant disruptions such as labor disputes, broad-scale internet outages, civil disorder and threats of cyber attacks. For impacted businesses, the immediate challenge is to cope with lost or impaired communications with employees, vendors and customers. Much of the planning for new events has begun to focus on communications continuity as a key element of business.

Download this paper to see how it will help IT leaders understand how Avaya can help plan and execute a solid approach to communication continuity preparedness.

The spring business cycle in our industry brought HP and Microsoft closer together, Avaya’s launch of Aura, Cisco’s go-to-market strategy for its unified computing system (UCS), Brocade’s 8000 FCoE switch launch, 3Com/H3C’s new 12500 data center core switch and re-emergence into the enterprise market, Voltaire’s entry into the ethernet data center market and much more. With the stocks of many networking companies trading higher than before the crash of 2008, it’s becoming clear that the efficiency gains of IT will play a major role in the fall economic up turn. With that in mind I review the major spring launches and provide my assessment.

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By Miercom

Avaya Aura Branch Edition (formerly known as Avaya Distributed Office) delivers rich communication, collaboration and mobility capabilities to customer-facing branch offices. Miercom was engaged to conduct a review of the Avaya Aura Branch Edition, which is the next release of the Avaya Distributed Office, R1.2. We focused on the new advanced features, enhancements and functionality available within this release, prior to the launch of the Branch Edition solution. Some of the information contained in this report is based on the previous Avaya Distributed Office evaluation.

To download the test results click here

By Avaya & EDS

Contact center decision-makers are focused on helping their company increase operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction. New contact center technologies, labor and market uncertainties are leading organizations to transition to an IP-based, or virtualized, model. This new paradigm removes significant operating expense from an enterprise, vastly simplifies the application and network infrastructure, and facilitates new contact center operating models such as agent off-shoring. These new architectures and operating models can dramatically reduce costs and improve an organization’s responsiveness to marketplace changes. This white paper is based upon years of real-world experience afforded by the Avaya/EDS partnership.

To find out about virtualization and how your company can benefit from it download this white paper.

By Avaya

There is no single strategy to ensure that enterprises will move forward with unified communications since each customer has a unique set of needs and existing infrastructure. Avaya understands this and moves customers toward unified communications to support complex and flexible work environments. The consultative process begins with a business assessment to understand the communication patterns within the organization, and to identify where business processes slow or bog down. To identify opportunities for unified communications, business processes should be evaluated to identify where latencies exist due to human interaction and communication.

This white paper offers proven strategies for UC implementation that are business process driven. Find out how by downloading this paper.

Unified Communications (UC) as an integrated launch point to multiple communications applications will swiftly fade as UC is integrated into corporate social networking and collaboration applications. This is the impression I walked away with after the Orlando VoiceCon industry event. The implication of this is systemic, sending change throughout the industry from suppliers, buyers, and even industry event organizers. What I mean is that UC as a standalone desktop application has limited value. IT and business leaders are pressing suppliers to improve user experience and in the process productivity.

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By Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group

The communications industry has touted Voice Over IP (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) as technologies that can transform the way workers collaborate and raise the bar on workers’ productivity. However, despite much industry hype, the majority of UC applications deployed revolves around basic conferencing services and unified messaging. More strategic UC applications, such as presence and mobile integration, remain near the bottom of the list of already-deployed UC applications. This raises the question: If UC has so much corporate value, why has technology adoption struggled?

The answer lies in the underlying architecture used to support UC. To meet the needs of today’s work force and support many of today’s business challenges, a new architecture for communications is required. This report defines UC and the business needs that drive UC, raise awareness of the challenges associated with UC deployment, and then defines what a new architecture should look like. Finally, it will provide the reader with insight into how to choose a solutions vendor and pursue the next steps in UC deployment.

Learn about UC architecture by downloading this white paper.

Kerravala and Blanco record a video on Avaya’s new Aura™ product. The video provides a good overview and assessment at the end. Links to additional Aura™ information are provided.