Avaya Announces Range of New Products, FeaturesAvaya Announces Range of New Products, Features

Avaya announces an OEM'ed session border controller capability, higher scalability for Session Manager, more virtualization capability, and plenty more.

Avaya today announced a raft of new products and product enhancements (press release here), with the overall theme of communications systems that scale higher, require fewer servers, and advance the migration toward SIP-based systems on the company's core Aura platform.

The announcement included a set of contact center releases, which Sheila McGee-Smith will review in a future blog.

Other highlights of the announcement include:

* Avaya Aura Messaging 6.0: According to Steve Hardy of Avaya, this enhancement is based on technology developed by messaging vendor Adomo, and is the platform Avaya will use to transition all its various legacy messaging offerings, including the former Nortel Call Pilot. However, at release time, it will only integrate Octel Aria; it will also be the system Avaya takes to greenfield opportunities.

* Avaya ACE 2.2: The Agile Communications Environment or ACE toolkit/APIs was one of Nortel's "crown jewels," according to Steve Hardy, and the latest update from Avaya includes a new packaged application, Event Response Manager, which orchestrates notification of key personnel. Also new with 2.2 are an API for text-to-speech applications used in Enterprise Resource Management; and an API for personalizing message recording and delivery.

* Avaya Aura Presence Services 6.0: The new release can deliver IM presence across Avaya's line of one-X clients; previously it was only available on the one-X Agent for call centers.

* Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0: The new addition here is something called Evolution Server deployment option, which facilitates hybrid deployment of SIP, H.323 and TDM endpoints.

* Avaya Aura Session Manager 6.0: Session Manager can now scale to 100,000 users including 50,000 SIP endpoints per Session Manager instance, with the ability to network up to 6 Session Manager instances, for total scalability of 300,000 SIP endpoints.

* Avaya Aura Session Border Controller 6.0: Avaya is licensing Acme Packet's SBC software and making it available as one of the applications that can be deployed with the System Platform virtualization system. The SBC software can support 750 concurrent SIP sessions, which Avaya says will serve about 5,000 employees. Customers with larger requirements would continue to go with an Acme Packet-branded appliance.

* Avaya Aura Conferencing Standard Edition 6.0: The new release allows audio, web, and video to be provided off a single server; previously, three separate servers would have been required to provide the same capability.

* Avaya Aura System Platform 6.0: In addition to the SBC instance, new applications now available in virtualized deployments include Communication Manager with enterprise configurations; Session Manager (Branch) for remote survivability; Application Enablement Services; Presence Services; Conferencing; and Aura Messaging.

Obviously, each of these points just scratches the surface. They represent mostly incremental but in some cases more sizable advances; in my briefing with Steve Hardy and Jorge Blanco of Avaya, I was also struck that, as much as any one product or capability, what Avaya is hoping to highlight with today's announcement is that it's executing on the product roadmap it announced in January, that it's meeting the commitments it's made to the marketplace as it digests its Nortel acquisition and squares off against Cisco.