HP and Avaya Partner on UC, Contact Center Solutions

By Doug Allen

Long-standing partners HP and Avaya have announced a further strengthening of ties, signing a three-year strategic agreement that allows HP to sell and deliver Avayas (including those assets acquired from Nortel Networks) Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center line through its own Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services portfolio for the enterprise.

The two already have deep ties to each others channel programs. Avayas Aura UC applications and architecture is already certified interoperable with HP networking gear under the HP AllianceONE program, and HP is a Platinum-or Gold-certified Avaya Connect channel partner worldwide, in addition to participating in Avayas DevConnect developer program.

Organizations face constant change and the decisions they make must be flexible enough to meet future needs such as unification of real-time communication with Web 2.0 and social media applications, said Gary M. Budzinski, senior vice president and general manager of Technology Services at HP. With HP and Avaya, clients can increase the agility of their existing communication architectures and realize the aspiration of unified communications for multivendor interoperability and ultimately save organizational costs.

Under the new partnership, HP is offering Avaya s Aura line, as well as Avaya Contact Center applications and a variety of end-user client applications and endpoints under HPs UC&C Lifecycle Services, a set of professional and managed services designed to help customers architect and deploy customized UC solutions, from planning to network design and implementation and support. HP is also offering a Managed Service for Aura that provides ongoing operational support for multivendor environments.

The two are also teaming up to craft vertical industry-specific solutions specifically in health care, life sciences and financial services that cater to these markets particular business requirements. Interoperability testing and certification of some solutions for all business sizes has already been completed.

HP and Avaya have highly complementary portfolios that deliver extraordinary benefits to customers, especially when combined with HPs consulting and IT outsourcing expertise, said Joel Hackney, senior vice president, Global Sales and Marketing, and president, Field Operations & Avaya Government Solutions at Avaya. The HP and Avaya relationship enables customers to take out costs and transform their business via the strategic application of communications tools and services in the procurement and management model that best suits a companys objectives.