SINGAPORE: Avaya today announced the launched the Avaya Aura architecture that is meant to easily integrate communications across multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal businesses.

According to a press release, Avaya Aura radically simplifies complex communications networks, reduces infrastructure costs and quickly delivers voice, video, messaging, presence, Web applications and more to employees anywhere. Avaya Aura will be available globally in May 2009.     

The new architecture is anchored by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based, open standards Aura Session Manager, which centralizes communications control and application integration. Session Manager orchestrates a wide array of communications applications and systems by decoupling applications from the network. As a result, services can be deployed to users depending on what they need rather than by where they work or the capabilities of the system to which they are connected. Session Manager instantly reduces complexity and provides the foundation for broader unified communications strategies.

Avaya Aura is a cost saver in these difficult economic times. Businesses can leave existing multi-vendor equipment and applications in place and bring in the benefits and simplicity of Avaya Aura’s architecture to drive significant and rapid return on investment and with the promise of greater business agility in the future, states the release.

“With Avaya Aura, organizations can achieve rapid returns on their business communications investment, while simplifying the development and deployment of applications that improve operational performance,” said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO, Avaya. “We’ve seen some organizations use SIP routing to reduce trunking costs by 20 percent to 60 percent.  With this new architecture, for the first time, the way we communicate is defined by the applications and the user, not the network.”

“Asia Pacific businesses have a lot to gain with Avaya Aura. On top of the new innovative applications, it creates a homogeneous communications environment, regardless of vendor equipment, locations or number of users while saving businesses dollars and cents,” said Rosemary Durand, Solutions Director, Avaya Asia Pacific.

“The global economic crisis has had significant ramifications for business in Asia Pacific over the past six months and a chief focus for enterprises today is to improve the management of their expenditure while cutting costs. With its ability to centralize management of communications systems across multiple locations, integrate multi-vendor set-ups, and save costs through improved trunking, Avaya is on the right track to meet the current and future needs of enterprises in Asia Pacific,” said Shalini Verma, Research Manager, Communications Research, IDC Asia Pacific.

Accrding to Avaya, Aura offers the ability to create new applications and quickly extend them to users anywhere. It also maps applications to individual employee profiles, making the appropriate features globally available regardless of the location, system or device to which they are connected.

 Avaya Aura includesthe following unified communications capabilities:

Communication Manager, Avaya’s flagship voice and video telephony software, becomes a business feature server, allowing the decades of customer innovation built into Avaya’s PBX platform to be exposed as SIP features and services coordinated from Session Manager.

Presence Services, formerly known as Intelligent Presence Services, takes a more central role within the communications platform, expanding the ability to federate presence from multiple sources and vendors for a more accurate view of an employee or work group availability.

Application Enablement Services and Integrated Manager, which remain the same.

For companies with branch locations, Avaya Aura Branch Edition provides the capabilities of Avaya Aura as a SIP-based replacement for key systems in small locations, enabling companies to go from stand-alone stores and branches to a full, SIP-connected enterprise.

Avaya Aura is supported by Avaya’s new consulting framework - Avaya Strategic Communications Consulting, which helps businesses evolve their communications using the most advanced expertise, tools and capabilities. This new consulting practice builds on Avaya’s strong record of helping companies meet business challenges using advanced communications technologies.

Avaya also has one of the broadest portfolios of SIP-based communications applications and an extensive community of independent software developers through the Avaya DevConnect program.

Avaya Aura is available in Branch, Standard and Enterprise Editions and carries forward the “all-inclusive” package pricing announced previously.

Avaya is also introducing an enhancement to its flagship portfolio for the small and medium enterprise market. The Avaya IP Office Customer Call Reporter is a new browser-based application that enables a small business to track and measure customer service and agent productivity levels.