Avaya Drives Real-time Collaboration for Crisis Management with Integrated Notification and Conferencing Solutions

Most organizations, be they governmental, educational or business-focused, have plans in place to deal with mission-critical events if and when they unfold. But how many are equipped with the right communications tools to respond effectively during such events? Rapid notification, response recognition and collaboration can mean the difference between success and failure, profit and loss, or even life and death. This is especially true today where adverse, fast-changing or unexpected events can impact both personal safety and operational resiliency. As critical events unfold, organizations need to be able to notify those with a need to know, providing information on what is taking place, solicit an acknowledgement or response, and efficiently and effectively engage in real time remediation collaboration.

In this regard, Avaya has just announced Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) 2.0. ANS is a software product supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as on Virtual Machine (VM) technology. ANS permits customers to initiate a broadcast and send a pre-scripted or pre-recorded message in different media formats to a targeted group of contacts, prompt for a response and optionally bring those contacts together into a pre-integrated conference bridge. The primary markets for this product are: government, education, energy and utilities, followed by financial services, manufacturing, and retail.

ANS Feature/Functionality

Pre-scripted or Pre-record Messages: Through the ANS web portal interface one can configure predefined message scenarios before an event occurs consisting of recorded messages, targeted lists of users and/or groups to receive the message, and define chains of escalations. An escalation specifies successful response criteria associated with each specific notification. If those criteria are not met ANS is directed to potentially notify a backup group or list of uses.

Notifications to Diverse End Points: Notification calls can be to office, BYOD and home. Delivery can include teletypewriters (TTY) and telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD). Text messages can be sent via SMS, email, and IM clients prompting a user in that text interaction to respond to a small list of menu items. An embedded link can send the recipient to a web conference. ANS also has the capability to stream audio directly onto phone speakers, overhead speaker systems and P25 mobile radio; display on digital signage; and send updates to social networking sites.

Integrated Conferencing and Collaboration: Instant collaboration can be facilitated through the "out-of-the-box" conferencing and collaboration capabilities. These capabilities use the same media server that mainstream Avaya conferencing services use. But they do not have the same operator/moderator controls and web collaboration capabilities. In a scenario where the customer needs someone to moderate the calls, end users can leverage third-party conferencing and collaboration services as well as Avaya Aura® Conferencing 7.0, Avaya Meeting Exchange and/or Radvision Scopia. In any case end-to-end reporting will still be enacted.

Detailed Reporting: Once a broadcast is issued or initiated all the information is captured and rendered for reporting back through the web portal. That's both summary and detailed reporting showing who was notified, when they were notified, if they responded, how they responded, when they responded, and from what device. If a conference was scheduled information is recorded of who was placed on the conference bridge, when they were placed in the bridge and when they left the bridge. All that information is captured and rendered in summary and detailed reports available through the web portal as web forms and as PDF reports with summary analysis and graphs. For customized reports and analytics, "raw" data is also available for download in Comma Separated Values (CSV) Format.

Web Portal: A comprehensive web-based workflow application is available that provides ease of administration, operations and management of the system. This is the primary mode of access, though when an incident occurs, notifications can be triggered by placing a call, or sending an email. Notifications can also be triggered automatically from a third-party system. Message broadcasts can be scheduled to execute at a later time.

Open API: There's an open web services API so that third-party technology partners can leverage the system to develop apps to notify contacts and those with a need to know, based on incidents and events being automatically processed from other systems, such as a Geographic Information System (GIS) mobile GPS, monitoring and management systems and business workflow.

Departmental Level Partitioning: Partitioning allows different departments and related agencies to work within their own private partition, yet utilize a single system, leverage similar scenarios and share a common resource. Partitioning begins with what the operator/manager can see in the system in terms of the list of messages they have access to and users that can contact with those messages. Also at the ANS partition level, the available communications port capacity - dictating the number of simultaneous calls that can be placed - can also be segmented. For example, with 200 ports available, 50 ports may be allocated to one partition while the remaining 150 ports are allocated to a larger group of individuals in a more urgent service type of application. Beyond the ANS partition is the VMware partition. Avaya recommends that customers use two servers for high availability (HA). Administrative tools are available, however, to support back-up in a single server environment. In order to encourage customers towards the HA option, pricing is below 2x the single server license.

Flexible Deployment Model: Customers canrun ANS from their data center or adopt it as a cloud service - provisioned, operated and managed by Avaya and Avaya authorized partners with competitive bundled telephony minutes of use included. Today the cloud solution is available from partners. Avaya will, itself, be offering it later in the year. Customers who have already invested in Avaya communications infrastructure will find that ANS will leverage and extend that investment by bringing new uses to the Avaya family of IP desk phones, and UCC solutions. ANS can also be configured to leverage a multivendor communica­tions environment as well.

What This Means to You

To Customers: Other players in the Crisis Management market include Benbria, Cassidian Communications, and Cisco IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS). Avaya's ANS brings three primary differentiators to the party. First, they see beyond just the notification aspect of crisis management. Avaya envisions crisis management in terms of notifying, interacting with and providing collaboration among the affected parties as essential components of a crisis management solution helping organizations and businesses reduce negative impacts from unplanned events. Second, Avaya was able to leverage its SIP-based, session-managed UCC application infrastructure in the design of ANS with its integrated Meet-me conferencing and collaboration capabilities. And third, ANS is available as either an on-premise or cloud-based solution.

Other vendors tend to fall into one or the other camp offering either on-prem or hosted solutions. Avaya's ability to offer choice here is important. There are risks that IT departments will want to consider when choosing a hosted solution. Does the IT organization want to give a hosted service provider access to an LDAP store of information that the HR department has on its employees? Do they want that service provider to have the ability to reach into its IP network? These are some of the considerations that need to be addressed before the on-premise/hosted solution choice is made.

Lastly, a single system for an integrated notification and collaboration solution such as ANS is likely to have a favorable TCO in comparison with its competitors. Customers should definitely shop around and compare.

To Partners: Avaya is currently working with a handful of partners ensuring that they are educated and up to speed to support the full services stack associated ANS including: requirements gathering, solution design, deployment, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. ISV partners can also engage in custom software development through Avaya's DevConnect program. Service provider partners also have an opportunity to profit from ANS via the hosting of ANS cloud solutions.