BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - December 13, 2010) - Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications systems, software and services, today announced new capabilities and customers for Avaya Agile Communication Environment™ (ACE), Avaya's software solution for embedding real-time communications into business applications. Using Avaya ACE, organizations across industries are finding it easier to create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) that streamline business collaboration, speed workflows and reduce costs.
New capabilities in Avaya ACE Release 2.3 include:
- Richer integration with Avaya Aura® through a broad set of packaged applications and Web services available on the Avaya Aura platform.
- A new client-side add-in for Microsoft Communicator that allows employees to click-to-call from online or premises-based Microsoft Communicator clients and engage in the conversation using their Avaya desktop phones. This cost-effective, streamlined, single-client experience is backed by Avaya Aura's industry-leading security, reliability and functionality and can be integrated under the Microsoft Office Communications Server standard client access license1.
- A packaged application to embed voice in the latest release of IBM® Lotus Notes® and Sametime®. Employees can click-to-call and see telephony presence from within Lotus Release 8.5.1 while using deskphones from Avaya or other vendors.
- A new toolkit for Avaya Aura that gives IT developers more control designing communications sessions whereby multiple actions can be triggered by specific criteria during the call setup. For example, a legal firm could build an application that identifies a client's incoming call, automatically records the call, sends the recording to a transcription service and bills the client.
Avaya ACE can reduce development times for CEBP solutions by as much as 80 percent over traditional CTI methods. Programmers with limited communications expertise can easily embed real-time communications in business applications and workflows using Avaya ACE's Web Services, open standards and packaged applications, and can use virtually any modern development environment to build applications that integrate with communications systems from a variety of vendors.
"Unified communications solutions alone provide significant value; however, when they are used to accelerate the business their value is multiplied," said Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner, Wainhouse Research, LLC. "Companies need tools like Avaya ACE that let software developers easily embed real-time communications and collaboration capabilities in line of business and customer-facing applications. This is where companies can see tremendous ROI on their investment in a UC environment."
Customers Reap Advantages of Avaya ACE
Avaya ACE drives delay out of business processes by allowing organizations to easily automate communications-intensive procedures and tasks. In healthcare, Florida Hospital used Avaya ACE to improve its regulatory compliance process methodology and reduce the time nurses spend on associated administrative tasks. Florida Hospital has approximately 200 emergency code carts that require one to two system checks per day. A new desktop application developed using Avaya ACE communication-enables the record-keeping and notification requirements for these checks. Now, once a nurse inspects a cart the application immediately contacts the appropriate departments concerning any code cart component failures to ensure prompt maintenance and eliminate time spent calling the department to correct the issue. By using Avaya ACE with automated reminders and electronic reporting, the hospital expects to decrease the time taken by this routine task and focus it on time with the patient.
"Our hospital is always looking for ways to improve patient safety and make our processes more efficient. By integrating communications with our emergency equipment management system, this solution gives us increased accountability with safety compliance processes," said Jason Aspinwall, director, Clinical Applications, Florida Hospital.
The City of Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada integrated its existing communications system and service provided by Bell Aliant with Microsoft OCS 2007 using Avaya ACE. The city calculates this implementation reduced operating costs by 29 percent compared to other integration alternatives. According to Ian MacKinnon, manager of Information Technology for the City of Saint John:
"A flexible, advanced and reliable IT and communications infrastructure is crucial to our municipal government business operations. The latest in unified communications products and services such as those provided by Avaya and Bell Aliant are key to enabling our workforce with current and future productivity improvements."
Avaya ACE Enable Channel Partners to Deliver Superior Solutions to Customers
Avaya Connect channel partners are taking advantage of Avaya ACE packaged applications and the developer toolkit to build differentiated CEBP solutions for their customers. Bell Aliant, one of North America's largest Service Providers and an Avaya channel partner, has worked closely with Avaya to help business customers understand the value of CEBP:
"Adding communications functionality to business applications easily and affordably allows enterprises to create innovative solutions and models that can differentiate their business in terms of service, savings or productivity," said Joe Mosher, vice president, Marketing, Bell Aliant. "Bell Aliant will participate in this emerging growth market by making these application capabilities available through various approaches, including both hosted and custom solutions."
Sabio, a UK-based, leading Avaya channel partner certified at the Platinum level, successfully integrated Avaya ACE capabilities into a proof of concept environment within a few days. Sabio sees value in Avaya ACE developer toolkits for reducing integration costs and allowing high level communication functions to be easily incorporated into end customer applications.
CROSS Telecom, a Platinum-certified Avaya Connect channel partner, sees great potential for innovation with Avaya ACE toolkits. According to David Lover, CTO for CROSS Telecom:
"With Avaya ACE you have the concept of a communications mashup. You can take the services provided by different components such as voicemail, web portal, or contact center and combine them together right away to create an application that is totally new, totally unique, and totally different from anything a manufacturer would typically give you in 18 months."
Avaya has a broad ecosystem of partners for delivery of innovative solutions that address an organization's business, end user, and infrastructure needs. Avaya Professional Services, members of the Avaya DevConnect program, service integrators and IT groups are creating mainstream communications-enabled applications designed to help organizations ride the next wave of business process improvement.
Additional Resources:
Whitepaper: Assessing the Opportunity for Communication-Enabled Business Solutions: Five Key Considerations http://bit.ly/hkoD2v
Video case study: Avaya ACE and IBM Lombardi Communications Enabled Business Processes http://youtu.be/_wKBw5UZR5c
About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.
Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Some of the key factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations include: our ability to develop and sell advanced communications products and services, including unified communications, contact center and data solutions; our ability to develop our indirect sales channel; economic conditions and the willingness of enterprises to make capital investments; the market for advanced communications products and services, including unified communications solutions; our ability to remain competitive in the markets we serve; our ability to manage our supply chain and logistics functions; the ability to protect our intellectual property and avoid claims of infringement; our ability to effectively integrate acquired businesses into ours; our ability to maintain adequate security over our information systems; environmental, health and safety laws, regulations, costs and other liabilities; the ability to retain and attract key employees; risks relating to the transaction of business internationally; pension and post-retirement healthcare and life insurance liabilities; and liquidity and our access to capital markets. We caution you that the foregoing list of important factors may not contain all of the material factors that are important to you. For a further list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
1. Integrations between Microsoft OCS and advanced voice communication systems from other vendors require customers to purchase the Enterprise client access license from Microsoft.
Contact Information:
Deb Kline
908-953-6179
klined@avaya.com