Avaya Expands Small & Mid-Size Business Communications Capabilities to Simplify and Secure BYOD

• New Avaya IP Office 8.1 Solution Enhances Mobility, Centralizes Management and Adds New Security Options
• Company's Flagship SME Solution Boosts Scalability, Driving Cost-Effective Collaboration for Mid-Sized Companies
• Techna Glass Selects IP Office 8.1 to Enhance Customer Service and Mobility

BASKING RIDGE, NJ — Avaya today announced the new version of its unified communications (UC) solution for small and mid-sized enterprises (SME), Avaya IP Office 8.1, which adds innovative capabilities to tap the full potential of next-generation collaboration. This includes new mobility, management and security features—as well as custom-built services—to help SMEs efficiently and securely take advantage of BYOD ("Bring Your Own Device") environments and advanced mobility.

Additionally, Avaya IP Office 8.1—which can serve SMEs as small as 5 employees—now scales up to 1,000 users in a single location (up from 384). This gives mid-sized companies a more cost-effective, simplified way to manage more people on a network in one or multiple sites. It also provides Avaya business partners with new opportunities to provide mid-market customers with affordable, yet high-capability collaboration solutions.

SME Mobility Made Simple, SecureAn April 2012 Forrester Research study on BYOD trends reported that 56% of SME workers who use a tablet for work say they bring in their own personal tablet, while 66% say the same for their smartphones¹. To ensure SMEs have the capabilities required for an evolving work environment, Avaya IP Office 8.1 introduces:

• Avaya Flare® Communicator, the advanced mobility app previously only available to large enterprises, is now available to Avaya IP Office SME users on Apple iPad tablets or Windows-based laptops. It enables mobile access to collaboration capabilities such as business-class calling, presence, company directory search, and management of two simultaneous calls while mobile. Avaya Flare® Communicator for iPad tablets lets users 'drag and drop' available contacts into a spotlight, and launch instant messages, voice calls or emails by simply tapping the screen. TheAvaya Flare® Communicator for Windows brings these capabilities to laptops.
• New Centralized Management and licensing capabilities eliminate the complexity of overseeing communications for multi-site environments by enabling effective management of several sites from one location. Adjustments to individual sites can be made using a simple administration tool, saving on costs, labor and time.
• Enhanced Security Options for Avaya IP Office adds protection against toll fraud, denial of service attacks, and other threats through use of a new SME version of Avaya Session Border Controller—a solution delivering a protective SIP-based firewall. It makes security easy and affordable for SMEs to implement, with advanced capabilities for mobile workers such as the ability to encrypt media and signaling connections without using a VPN for UC. Availability anticipated later calendar 3Q '12.
• Avaya IP Office Support Service, the first support service from Avaya for SMEs, provides fast resolution, technical support from experts, and secure remote access. New SSL-VPN capabilities embedded in Avaya IP Office 8.1 help ensure secure delivery of upgrades, patches and Web-based services. Customers are entitled to major upgrades, and Avaya partners can offer it via wholesale or co-delivery models.

Additional IP Office Information:

• IP Office 8.1 can be paired with Avaya's recently introduced ERS 3500 switches to automate network set-up. One simple command automatically configures the switches and enables IP phones on Avaya IP Office.
• Avaya one-X Mobile® Preferred for IP Office mobility app is now available for iPhone devices (previously announced for Android devices), bringing comprehensive business-class UC features to SME iPhone users.
• Interoperability between Radvision SCOPIA endpoints and IP Office is expected at the end of 2012, offering open, cost-effective and easy-to-use video collaboration.
• Avaya IP Office is sold exclusively through Avaya's channel partners. The solution is available now globally.

IP Office - Unified Communication Solutions

Designed specifically for small and midsize business communications, an Avaya IP Office phone system enables your entire team to connect and collaborate in real-time using smart phones, laptops, tablets, home phones, and office phones.

IP Office delivers the collaboration tools you need, from basic telephony to the most sophisticated unified communications. An IP Office phone system ensures that you have the most productive mobile workforce through its contemporary unification platform, and its capacity to increase capabilities as your business grows through flexibility and scalability.

Some of the options built into IP Office include:

• Grow from five employees to 1,000 (at a single site) and network up to 32 locations.
• Add video capabilities with the Avaya Flare® Experience and our Radvision Scopia® products.
• Deliver applications to everyone: mobile and office workers, receptionists, remote staff, and customer service agents and supervisors.
• Track, record, and report on calls to build optimal customer interactions.
• Deploy a hybrid solution. Use IP, digital, analog or SIP technology in any combination. IP Office can interoperate with more than 2 million Avaya systems worldwide.
• Combine IP Office with Avaya data networking products (with plug-and-play simplicity), security features, intuitive and centralized management tools, and affordable support services for a comprehensive communications solution.
• Scale cost-effectively as your business grows. Simply build on what you have, without the need to replace technology.

With more than 300,000 systems installed worldwide, IP Office is the leader in unified communications for small and midsize businesses. IP Office was awarded Unified Communications Product of the Year in 2011 from both TMC and Frost & Sullivan.

Learn more about IP Office at -
http://www.synectictech.com/ipoffice.html

Did you attend the Avaya Evolutions "Power of We" event in San Francisco?

It was a fantastic event, complete with business and industry predictions for 2013, new product announcements, and a fireside chat with Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy and Steve Wozniak of APPLE.  Steve discussed his thoughts on enterprise communications and technologies, affirming his belief in the power of collaboration and the value of strong communication in enterprise.

Here is a short recap of Steve's predictions:

• Businesses will look to use collaboration solutions that "just work" - for every possible need
• Data center technologies will be to 2013 what the Cloud was for 2012
• Consumer technologies believed to be years in the making will enter the workplace sooner than we expect
• Businesses will think differently about BYOD and consumerization of IT
• Collaboration will transcend platforms

Kevin Kennedy notes, "The explosive growth and development of technology has made it increasingly important to make predictions, lest you cannot truly innovate to meet the needs of the market. Likewise, it is this rapid growth that makes predictions difficult, risky, and ultimately fun."

There was lots of good information shared at the Event which included Steve's predictions which included flexible screens of the future, and of course several new announcements from Avaya--mostly around video. Avaya's been busy integrating the Radvision products with the Avaya products.

Perhaps the biggest announcement (and a great demo for the event) was the integration of UC and room based systems, as well as the use of video on tablets, smartphones, and PCs. Avaya demonstrated how it is "extending the community of endpoints" for video by adding video to the Flare Experience across a variety of devices. Avaya Aura Conferencing with Avaya Flare Experience 1.1 now has multipoint video capabilities based on Radvision Scopia available for iOS and Windows desktops.

The conferencing solution supports up to 7,500 concurrent sessions or up to 75,000 users, based on a Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-enabled switched video architecture. During his presentation, Gary Barnett stated that the Avaya solution uses 83% less bandwidth than Microsoft, and 63% less than Cisco.

Other announcements include:

• Interoperability between Scopia and Avaya IP Office. IP Office 8.1 now supports HD Scopia, providing more options for mid-sized organizations.
• Avaya Client Applications plug-ins for Microsoft Lync, Outlook and Office integration--Avaya Client Applications are plug-ins that let Avaya Aura integrate with Microsoft Lync/OCS, Office, Internet Explorer and Dynamics (as well as IBM Sametime and Salesforce.com) for real-time collaboration. Until now, Avaya ACE was required to integrate Avaya Aura with Lync, but now customers can do the integration simply by using the plug-ins.
• Scopia Mobile on Android (iPhones and iPads are already supported).
• The Scopia TIP Gateway-enabled integration with Cisco (Tandberg), LifeSize, and Polycom, to support and integrate with customers' existing telepresence solutions.
• Scopia Management System adds a browser-based interface for managing a video collaboration deployment from PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets.

Here's a quick demonstration by Avaya's Lloyd Halverson of the Avaya Flare Experience using IM, presence, video, chat, collaboration, etc. across various endpoints with a single user interface.

Avaya Evolutions San Francisco

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