Avaya ACE Integrates Real-Time Communications With Applications More Easily

Avaya has announced that the Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE), its software solution for integrating real-time communications into business applications, has been upgraded with new capabilities in its 2.3 release.

With Avaya ACE, organizations can create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) with ease, helping streamline business collaboration, increase the workflow speed, and lower costs. Among the new capabilities in the Release 2.3 are a richer integration with Avaya Aura, a new client-side add-in for Microsoft Communicator that gives employees click-to-call capabilities from Microsoft Communicator clients, a packaged application that embeds voice in the latest IBM Lotus Notes and Sametime releases, and a new toolkit for Avaya Aura that provides IT developers with more control for designing communications sessions.

Compared to traditional CTI methods, Avaya ACE can reduce the development time for CEBP solutions by up to 80%, and with Avaya ACE's Web Services, programmers can embed real-time communications in business applications and workflows, even with limited communications expertise.

"With its increased focus on applications enablement, via its latest powerful extensions to ACE, Avaya has stepped up its users' capabilities to truly integrate communications with business processes to effect improved business performance," says David Yedwab of UCStrategies. "The outcomes can be quick, clean business process enablement via simple SOA applications development. The complications for Avaya will be the ability of its channels to sell both the infrastructure upgrades required to implement Aura (usually an IT activity) and at the same time, sell applications to Lines of Business while enabling someone to do the application - this will require sophisticated channels with relationships in multiple camps - not always pre-existing. Also, while interfaces to both IBM and Microsoft telephony clients are standard, support for Microsoft's latest announcement - Lync - is still off in 2011 - but then again, so perhaps, are Lync deployments."

According to UCStrategies UC Expert Art Rosenberg, "It is interesting to see the focus of Avaya's technology move towards automating real-time 'notifications.' While this can typically be application-based initiation of voice calls to individual recipients, it also lends itself to SMS notifications and non-real-time email, as well. The key benefit is to eliminate human involvement to initiate the real-time notification information, while facilitating the receipt of the notification in real-time by an 'available' recipient (Process-to-person). Needless to say, the real-time 'notification' can then lead to other self-service applications or 'click-to-call' connections with people as well. That comprehensive approach will provide maximum operational efficiencies and cost savings in the real world of UC."

For more information, visit www.avaya.com.