Avaya Updates UC Offering For SMBs With Scalability In Mind
Avaya on Monday debuted a new version of IP Office, its primary unified communications offering for small-and-medium sized businesses.
The update, IP Office Release 5, is software than can be customized to meet the needs of workplace roles such as “tele-worker” or “mobile worker,” allowing VARs to more easily identify what applications are needed for which customers.
IP Office also supports up to 384 users using the IP Office 500 Server, which according to Avaya will now be its single hardware platform for IP Office, although Release 5 will work with existing 406v2 and 412 servers as well.
Avaya began rolling out IP Office Release 5 to channel partners in early August. Among several additional features, Release 5 uses productivity applications and a call reporting application, Customer Call Reporter, both accessible via Web browser. It further offers support for third party SIP phones, and in addition to the increased user capacity, conferencing capacity has doubled and now comes as two 64-party bridges.
Release 5 also has a business continuity hook for businesses that have multiple sites. It can use servers at alternate sites so that if one site goes out, the IP communications network will automatically come back up at another.
The goal, according to Avaya, was to give SMBs expanded options with their IP communications without having to do a massive upgrade.
“It enables business to do things faster and more efficiently, and that’ll turn into profits,” said Joe Scotto, director, small and medium business communications at Avaya. “The number one pain point was around keeping existing customers spending but also helping them reduce expenses.”
“We had a regional bank that had IP office, and they grew and were faced with going with an enterprise solution,” said Bobby Stewart, president, enterprise networks at CCI Telecom, a Statesville, N.C.-based solution provider. “But because of release 5, we can upgrade them for about a third of the price as an enterprise solution would be.”
The move toward using Web applications to manage IP Office has been similarly appealing, Stewart said.
“If we go into Mac or Linux-only shops, we can deploy our apps and give them what they want. I have a bunch, plus my Windows desktop, and they’re all running the same identical Avaya apps,” he said. “That also frees up my technical staff. To us that’s huge, very huge.” – crn
- TechNews
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