George Paolini, VP Solutions Marketing, Avaya, talked about the future of unified communications and collaboration, social media, BYOD, enterprise application integration and trends in the Indian market with Prashant L Rao
We have just released a new app for the iPad called Flare. We will also release it for Android and Windows Phone. We don’t see it replacing a desktop device. It seems to be augmenting and is an area of focus for us. We are firmly embracing BYOD.
Tell us about Web.alive. How does it differ from the typical UC solution?
Web.alive provides a real-time 3D environment for a meeting. It lets you walk through a virtual environment so that you can have a conference that allows you greater flexibility than you have in a conference today. We use it at Avaya in our leadership team. About 50-75 people used to get together once a quarter. Now we get together virtually. You can start the meeting and for the first 10 minutes of social time, you can walk around the room and hear other conversations. As you move through the environment the audio capabilities change. So it’s louder in the direction that you are turning. It allows you to present PowerPoint or walk into a room where a PowerPoint presentation is being made. Customers are using it for training. We have companies that are using it for training sales staff on new products & services. We have a large insurance company that just licensed Web.alive. It runs on Windows.
Are you integrating social media into your UC offerings?
If you look at our end-user clients, we have been integrating into social media for the last two years. With Flare or one-X, we have always had capabilities to ensure that you can interact with different media types. The underlying infrastructure for doing that is Aura. It deals with multiple modes of communication. Our contact center has a new social media engine for dealing with multiple media types. If you want to monitor what’s being said about your company, you will be able to proactively reach out to a disgruntled customer.
Is the integration of UC with enterprise applications important?
We have got an application platform called ACE that’s based on Web services and allows you to either link to existing CRM or other business apps without having any knowledge of the underlying telephony API or even build new apps. We have partners who are doing that and it’s very popular. Right now one of the most popular requests that we have is for integration with Microsoft Lync. ACE can link into SAP or Salesforce.com or any other application.
What’s happening on the video front?
We are focused on providing ease of use and access to an end-user. The idea is to have the same level of experience as Telepresence but without the cost. We have released a technology called ADVD, our own tablet. We have sold about 4,000 units of that worldwide. We have video in one-X on the desktop. We will have future versions of Flare on iPad and Windows that will support video capability.
We have room-based systems as well. There we see the need for integration with any other existing system. What we hear from customers is that bandwidth consumption is their biggest concern. We look at how to manage that and have build those capabilities into Aura and our video solutions.
What are the trends that you see in the Indian market?
The market in India has shifted dramatically in recent years. Even at Avaya, our largest number of R&D employees are in India—2,200 of 18,500 are based in India. We have a significant investment in India. The ability to collaborate remotely is significant and video is an effective tool for doing that. We see an increased need for collaboration tools in India. Because R&D is a significant portion of the work that’s being done here, high-tech has been number one. Government’s big in India. When you look at the cost of travel, the use of video to reduce those costs is significant.
Is voice still the predominant application or is there a shift in the mix?
The mix is changing because Aura and session management provides a whole different level of capabilities around managing apps in the network in real time than it did three years ago. Aura allows you to create apps that can be deployed regardless of the user’s device.
Where do you see UC headed?
In the next couple of years we see a lot of demand for a unified collaboration environment where you have Web sharing, voice, video etc. In our solutions, every call is a conference call with voice and video. It allows you to set up an ad hoc conference. We see a lot of potential around new apps. We treat every mode of communication as a session, we see potential around the integration of those sets of capabilities to create new applications for content sharing in ways that we haven’t seen before. An area that will be significant for us is what we call context. Today we talk about IM/ Presence—you know if I’m available or not. We see the next level beyond that around what we call awareness. Not only are you available but what are you doing, what documents do you have, what do you need – we call that context and you will see a lot of development from us in that area.