It’s been a busy start to the year for Avaya. The UC giant started off by launching the Flare Communicator for iPad and set the clock ticking for bringing Flare to the IP Office platform. It then stepped up the mobile quotient further by launching a new suite of mobile applications which focuses primarily on care coordination, patient interaction, and telehealth/home-care delivery, which means a push towards making our healthcare easier to manage for the medical professionals and easier to access for the patients.
And earlier this month, Avaya introduced Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions (COS) – a new set of outsourcing services aimed at unified communication, contact centers, data networking, and video communications. And now the company has announced its aggressive intent to dig deeper into the cloud provider business, thereby potentially offering new opportunities for Canadian service providers.
To that effect, Avaya yesterday unveiled the Collaborative Cloud, a strategic framework for delivering communications and collaboration applications and services to businesses through public, private and hybrid cloud models. It also announced the launch of the AvayaLive(TM) suite of unique, public-cloud delivered solutions, including the new AvayaLive Connect solution and the enhanced AvayaLive Engage.
The new offerings were unveiled by Avaya’s Brett Shockley, Avaya’s senior VP and general manager for applications and emerging technologies, as part of his keynote speech at the UBM’s Enterprise Connect conference. He also emphasized the company’s radical shift in the UC paradigm from ‘presence’ to ‘awareness’, thereby setting the ground for future updates to the Avaya Flare experience, which includes the Flare desktop device as well as Flare for Windows and Flare for iPad.
As for Avaya’s Collaborative Cloud strategy, it was always a question of when rather than if the company would take a deeper plunge into the cloud segment. Although Avaya has been operating in this market for a while, it’s never publicized its cloud strategy till date. Avaya says the new Collaborative Cloud takes into account all key stakeholders including large enterprises, service providers and VARs.
“The strategy is a continuation of one we have had in place, but there’s more formality to it now,” said David Murashige, VP, Business Development, Avaya. “In the past we would have talked about individual pieces — the Cloud as it related to Aura or Web alive. We would have approached it in a siloed way. Now we are trying to create a broader perspective.”
The company’s AvayaLive offering includes a hosted UC solution for SMBs called AvayaLive Connect, and AvayaLive Engage 3.0, the successor to company’s earlier collaboration environment formerly known as web.alive. Engage offers several new features as compared to web.alive including support for Apple Mac OSX operating systems and Safari browsers, video collaboration with webcam sharing, video streaming upload and synched playback, and enhanced collaboration tools.
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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.comby:RSS,Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
