Avaya launches Voice Portal in India  

BANGALORE: Networking major Avaya has launched its

latest version of its Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform- the Voice

Portal 3.0 in India. This portal is an improvement on the existing product and

offers IP standards and a web-based platform. “Compared to the traditional IVR

which is hardware specific, the Voice Portal platform integrates

service-oriented architecture (SOA), and web services,” said Michael Perry,

senior manager, Voice self service, Avaya.






Although Avaya launched the Voice Portal in the third quarter of 2005, it is
introducing the product in India only now. “We feel that the timing now is

right since several customers like telcos are talking about moving to a SIP

(Session Initiation Protocol) based platform,” said Amit Mitra, national

marketing manager, call centre solutions, Avaya GlobalConnect. He added that the

new platform scales better and enables IVR applications and SOA.






On the kind of customers who would be interested in going for the Voice Portal,
Mitra said that enterprises which were looking for a centralised “command and

control” system to manage highly distributed applications across IP telephony

or time Division Multiplexing (TDM) networks would be interested. “Enterprises

are looking to consolidate their infrastructure and bring down the cost of

ownership and deployment.”






The segments, which are being targeted, include telecom service providers,
banking, financial services and insurance. The company is currently conducting

pilot deployments at a leading bank. Mitra said that banks are looking for

secure ways to conduct transactions such as RTGS through speech and IVR.






For the developer community, the Voice Portal includes the Dialog Designer,
which is an Eclipse-based application development tool that allows designers to

create speech applications.






Avaya
is working with partners for speech recognition in local languages and already

has Hindi voice support available. The self-service platform also integrates

pieces of information across channels such as e-mail, chat, SMS and calls and

can also initiate services such as instant messages and faxes.






A significant portion of the Voice Portal development was done out of Avaya's
lab in Pune. Besides banking on its in-house team, the company has also tied up

with partners and SIs such as Realsoft and Servion for developing and deploying

speech and voice based applications.

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