Avaya Pushes Aura Communications Platform Downstream

Communications resellers serving the midsize enterprise space now have another arrow in their quiver of UC solutions, thanks to Avaya.

The business collaboration vendor has introduced two new versions of its popular Aura communications platform – one for midsize enterprises and the other for branch office environments – giving companies the technology to take advantage of unified communications no matter what their size.

“What we are introducing is a focus on extending collaboration capabilities and Aura to locations of all sizes across the network,” said Ingrid Tremblay, director of Avaya Aura Core Marketing. “Now regardless of whether users are at a branch location, a regional office or corporate headquarters, they all have the ability to access the same capabilities across the entire network.”

The Avaya Aura Solution for Midsize Enterprise is housed in one virtualized server to service 250 to 1000 users. It includes all the features available in the Avaya Aura for Enterprise, including session manager for management of all SIP endpoints, presence, session border controller and the ability to connect to collaboration offerings such as the Avaya Flare Experience or videoconferencing applications.

“This is the full Aura solution consolidated into a small footprint,” Tremblay said. “VARs who are certified to sell Aura are instantly certified to sell into this market. It increases their market space by 30 percent to 50 percent.”

The Avaya Aura Branch offering, dubbed the Avaya B5800 Branch Gateway supports up to 350 users per branch and can be managed either on site or at the Aura core at the main office. Additionally, it can be used in environments where certain applications are managed locally, such as auto attendant, and others managed centrally, such as videoconferencing.

“In distributed environments, [a number] of organizations want to move to a centralized architecture to support branch strategies, but if they don’t have a WAN infrastructure in place they need to have their applications localized,” Tremblay said. “The B5800 can connect via SIP to the Avaya Aura core so SIP endpoints are controlled through the Aura at the main office to enable a centralized managed environment, or they can be managed locally using any combination of endpoints including H.323. The office also can choose to go with a mixed environment, in which collaborative applications are managed from the centralized core and other applications connected locally.”

Tremblay noted also that in centralized architecture should the WAN connection go down users are supported locally with local voice service and backup to the PSTN.

Avaya also announced three new conferencing endpoints developed following the company’s acquisition of Konftel in January 2011.

Tremblay noted the new solutions should be an easy sell for Avaya partners already familiar with the Aura platform. “We’re not trying to reinvent the world here. We want to leverage what out channel partners already know about Avaya.”

The B5800 is slated for availability at the end of March 2011, while the Midsize Enterprise solution is slated to be available in April 2011. The conferencing endpoints are expected to be available in April or May 2011.

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