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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.

Avaya has launched a new architecture for Unified Communications (UC) with its new software product Avaya Aura™. This enterprise-wide SIP architecture connects users, UC devices, disparate legacy voice and IP systems plus UC applications, creating a holistic UC services delivery system. That is, a centrally managed Avaya Aura™ can disseminate common UC services to every corner of the enterprise independent of locations and multivendor systems, across all kinds of SIP endpoint. Avaya Aura™ promises to significantly reduce communications and management costs, using a single multivendor dial-plan, common user profiles and by simplifying SIP trunking, while offering federated presence and application integration software to integrate UC into enterprise applications. To understand Avaya Aura™ and what’s next for UC, Lawrence Byrd, Director of Unified Communications Architecture for Avaya, is my guest.

By Wainhouse Research sponsored by Avaya

This white paper describes a four-step framework for moving unified communications from an ad hoc, deployment scenario, which has resulted in many of the companies interviewed having a siloed implementation, to a managed process, tying the technology to an organization’s people, processes, and business objectives.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.

By Avaya

A guide that takes you through the latest contact center technologies, and how they can help you develop brand differentiation, elevate customer loyalty, and keep costs low — even when everyone is tightening their budgets. A must-read in today’s economic climate.

Find out how to thrive in today’s turbulent economy by downloading this white paper.

By Avaya

Unified Communications is the convergence of real-time and non-real-time business communication applications. These applications include voice and video telephony, conferencing, collaboration, voice and video mail, instant messaging, email, calendaring and contacts. Users access these capabilities using multiple modalities including voice, data, and speech access, as well as through multiple devices – from mobile phones to PCs. Ultimately, these communications services will be embedded into a wide variety of core business processes. This executive brief first discusses the business benefits of UC, then ends with a set of recommended approaches to help companies ensure smooth and successful UC deployments that optimize application performance according to each business’s unique needs.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.

Clearly the economic news over the past five months has been disturbing and at many times scary. So the question we ask is why invest in Unified Communications (UC) now and not wait until the recovery? The answer is straightforward, as UC not only pays for itself with a rapid payback measured in months, and at times as short as six weeks, but most importantly it reduces corporate operational cost by streamlining business processes. Steve Hardy Director Global Product and Solutions Marketing for Avaya joins me to discuss investing in UC now during a challenging macro economic climate. For any executive seeking both IT and corporate cost cutting projects, you need to listen to this podcast.

This paper provides an overview of the business value related to the joint Unified Communications solutions offered by Avaya and Microsoft. Readers will understand the elements and steps involved in making a Unified Communications deployment decision and cover success factors. Also included is a section covering the factors IT leaders should consider when calculating a return on investment (ROI) of their Unified Communications solution.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.