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
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.
