Avaya adds new communications as a service solutions for CSPs

GUILDFORD, UK: Avaya announced new models and enhanced functionality for the Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of turnkey communications and collaboration solutions for both enterprises and Cloud Service Providers.

Avaya is introducing two new Collaboration Pod models specifically for Cloud Service Providers, enabling them to offer Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) to end customers. Cloud Service Providers Connex and ROI Networks will be powering their new UCaaS offers for their customers using the Avaya Collaboration Pod.

For enterprises, Avaya has added advanced Customer Experience Management functionality to the Collaboration Pod, which now provides support for multichannel interactions through Avaya Elite Multichannel, self-service with Experience Portal and management through Avaya Call Management System, in addition to full Unified Communications capabilities.

All Collaboration Pod models have also been enhanced with Avaya Fabric Connect networking. Fabric Connect, a standards-based network virtualization technology, improves the network performance of real-time applications and provides simplified virtual machine mobility, greater agility and faster time to service via end point provisioning.

Based on solutions from Avaya, EMC and VMware, the Avaya Collaboration Pods deliver virtualized applications, computing, storage, and networking with all administrative and provisioning functions consolidated in a single orchestration system.

Avaya provides integrated support for all Collaboration Pod components, simplifying software upgrades and eliminating the need for support coverage from multiple vendors. Fully-integrated, tested and ready-to-deploy, Avaya Collaboration Pods can reduce the time to deploy virtualized real-time applications from months to weeks.

Avaya Collaboration Pods are customized and pre-configured to the requirements of each customer and can be expanded as needs change. For Cloud Service Providers, the Collaboration Pods support multi-tenancy and multi-instance deployments. Avaya Collaboration Pods can offer a reduced Total Cost of Ownership over a five year period versus comparable do-it-yourself (DIY) and appliance-based approaches.

The new Avaya Collaboration Pods will be generally available in the third calendar quarter.