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Talking Intelligence

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CIOL Bureau
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Vivek TuljapurkarAvaya is a well- known name in IP telephony, unified communications and contact centers. Of late it has started making noise in a new terrain with its latest product offering of Intelligent Communications (IC). On the face of it, IC seems a solution for integrating business processes into a single service window and includes a variety of communication tools like web chat, email and phone that are integrated into a single application in IC.

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Reportedly, for Avaya bringing together communication opens another window of opportunity and though the IC market is at a nascent stage in India (while the US and Western European countries like the UK) figure as mature IC markets), the company expects it to grow in the next two years.

Vivek Tuljapurkar, managing director, Avaya R&D, chats up with  of CyberMedia News on what triggers the company's steps in this new direction, on whether IC is just another piece of jargon or a justifiable fresh forte, and of course on the happenings in areas like VoIP and Internet Telephony.

Read on…

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CMN: How would Avaya define Intelligent Communication?

Vivek Tuljapurkar: Intelligent Communications (IC) is about taking communications a leap beyond the state-of-the-art. It is about taking human latency out of communications, about removing process delays, about providing communications in just the right form to the right device. IC can be accomplished by embedding communications capability into business processes and linking business applications with communications applications or software on any network. On top of this, Avaya integrates with its customers' applications and processes and enables any device (deskbound, desktop and mobile, PDA etc.) to communicate with all the features of the enterprise telephony system.

CMN: What is the equation between Intelligent Communications (IC) and convergence?

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VT: One may view IC as the next step after convergence; one that really takes advantage of the great technological advance that convergence represents. The main idea behind convergence is to unify various types of communications networks and to eliminate the need for multiple types of devices. The purpose of IC is to take advantage of the technological progress made by convergence by embedding communications in the business processes of enterprises to drive greater productivity and efficiency.

CMN: How's IC different from Unified Communications? Any possibilities of an overlap?

VT: Unified Communication (UC) allows individuals or groups of individuals to communicate using whatever mode of communication they prefer, at the time and from the location of their preference. In a way, UC also allows the convergence of real-time and non-real-time communication. People use many different devices to communicate (wireless phones, personal digital assistants, personal computers, thin clients etc.), and there are multiple ways to communicate such as email, voice and voice mail, instant messaging, video, and collaboration. As the name suggests, UC is about unifying these methods of communication across devices to enhance individual and organizational productivity.

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Avaya views UC as a key enabler of Intelligent Communications. Unified Communications is not about being more connected, it is about helping the enterprise and their employees to be better connected. As a key solution under our Intelligent Communications strategy, UC addresses the issue of disconnected communications devices and applications. It also integrates the disparate communications servers, technologies, devices and applications into a single platform. We do that by providing integrated, multi-vendor business communications applications across all enterprise communication solutions regardless of location, network, or device.

CMN: So today, what does your IC portfolio look like?

VT: Over the last few years, Avaya has been playing a pioneering role in the new space, providing solutions that include Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP), Unified Communications Services, Contact Center and IP Telephony solutions to customers in India and worldwide. These have been enabling over 6000 organizations to increase employee productivity and business efficiency, simply decision-making and problem solving, cut time and costs, improve customer responsiveness and, enhance global competitiveness and profitability. Avaya's IC solutions are targeted at both large and SME organizations.

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CMN: What has been Avaya's traction so far? What next is brewing?

VT: Avaya's aim is to provide intelligent communication to the enterprise employee. Towards this end the R&D is working on a variety of technologies to provide multimodal collaboration and communication, indexing, mining and rendering relevant contextual cues during the communication at the right time, right place and to the right device be it a fixed endpoint or a wireless one. Other areas are providing rich multi-modal customer self-service and agent-assisted service applications and finally in embedding communications in business processes to help reduce human latency.

So far, IC has been received very well by the market. More and more of our products are beginning to incorporate IC-ready features and functions. Also, we are adopting our IC-related products and solutions to a wider variety of industries and business processes.

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CMN: What role would alliances like the one with Extreme Networks play in beefing up your IC portfolio?

VT: The Avaya and Extreme relationship is actually a strategic alliance that offers our customers a single point of contact for the delivery of converged networking solutions.

Extreme Networks provides data solutions for security, availability and performance demands of converged networks. Avaya brings to the table advanced voice IP applications. Avaya and Extreme have embarked on a multi-year, multi-million dollar joint development to enhance the functionality, security and quality of converged networks and to simplify their deployment and management. Together, this powerful alliance provides our customers with advanced converged networking solutions and services not available anywhere else in the market.

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CMN: How is the VoIP market shaping up? What's the latest exciting bit on Avaya's plate here?

VT: Clearly the future of communications is VoIP. It has been observed from the current trends that VoIP is one of the hottest technologies in the communications industry today. Businesses and consumers are already taking advantage of the cost savings and new features of making calls over a converged voice-data network, and the logical next step is to take those advantages to the wireless world. The potential impact of wireless VoIP on the communications market is enormous.

Telecommunications carriers around the world have already introduced IP into their networks because it provides economic benefits over traditional telecommunications networks. Wireless VoIP offers potential savings by allowing companies to change the way they manage their phone systems. According to VOICE&DATA estimates, the voice solutions market stood at Rs 1,413 crores growing at 27.8 per cent in FY '06-07. The IP-PBX took the lion's share of 50 per cent and TDM PBX reduced to 30 per cent of the total market, and other technologies such as KTS contributed 20 per cent.

On the lines of Web 2.0 would be something like VoIP 2.0. It will facilitate more flexibility, customization and powerful features. It will be the next phase of VoIP.

CMN: Your comments on the current price wars in the Internet telephony space and the gradual substitution of PC from other devices (mobiles etc)?

VT: I would restrain from commenting on price wars; this is outside the domain of what Avaya does.

Regarding substitution of PC with other devices, we view this as a natural progression of things. As we have seen over the last few decades, technology only gets smaller, faster, and cheaper with passage of time. End-user devices are a very important, maybe even the most important area of technological development as they are the touch-point with users and define what the user experience will be like. So it is inevitable that end-user devices will get smaller, faster, cheaper, and indeed better in every sense. We welcome such developments; they only make it easier to take advantage of convergence and make IC technology easier and cheaper to deploy and more accessible for our customers.

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