Avaya: Surge Provides New Partner Opportunities for IoT Initiatives

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Avaya on Tuesday unveiled a new partner-led Internet of Things (IoT) security and management offering that runs on any vendor’s network.

Avaya Surge, formerly SDN Fx Healthcare, was announced during the company’s Engage conference in Las Vegas. Surge will be available through Avaya channel partners in the second quarter.

Surge was among numerous announcements made by Avaya aimed at showing partners that it is continuing to innovate and is poised to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy a stronger company.

Randy Cross, Avaya’s senior director of networking, tells Channel Partners the company introduced Surge to be offered by partners — with the idea they can build additional services around it.{ad}

“When we get into the world of IoT, there’s a ton of opportunity,” he said. “I was speaking to a channel partner who happens to have an SI business. We were discussing around analytics capacity and capabilities for IoT. They have a capture engine that does big-data type of capture and can do different kinds of analysis on the data that’s there. So we have a call to go over how we’re going to integrate that into Surge. We’re just putting a platform in place that has the ability to intercept the data for you, get the data to you, and then it really comes down to whatever kinds of things you can imagine or your customers can imagine that they would like to have around that.”

According to Avaya, with Surge, IoT devices are less visible and protected from harmful traffic such as viruses and malware. Also, it learns and updates from traffic flows, providing continuous, ongoing security improvement.

Surge also reports asset utilization that details the operational activity of devices. In addition, it offers programmable APIs to allow organizations to customize services and applications.

“Surge is completely new to the market, built from the ground up,” said Marc Randall, senior vice president and general manager of Avaya networking. “Once connected … you can identify the device and start to add intelligence and security to the device through (an) open network adapter.”

Rob Huff, CEO of Step Communications Group, said Surge allows his company to tell a “good story to the medical arena.”

“There’s a huge issue right now in that entire vertical with security, security of endpoint, security of devices,” he said. “You have different OSes running on all of these devices, as well as tracking of assets. So Surge is a very cost-effective way to be able to enable them to secure their infrastructure and secure their devices. For us as a business partner, it allows us to get deeper and broader into accounts, and allows us to create a really nice recurring revenue stream from a services perspective.”