Avaya Launches new SIP Offerings
Article By : Sufia Tippu
Broadens its Unified Cloud as a Service portfolio
BENGALURU — Networking and communications vendor Avaya is back in business and has recently announced its open SIP offerings to expand its Desktop Experience portfolio.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an open signaling protocol standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in cooperation with many industry leaders, including Avaya, for establishing, managing, and terminating real-time communications over large IP-based networks, such as the Internet.
Avaya’s SIP offerings will enable unified communication service providers deliver a richer experience to the business desktop. With a range of digital communication tools dotting today’s workplace with a diverse workforce, companies that provide Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) need to move up from offering only phones with voice calling features to smart devices that allow users to personalise their communications and provide one-touch access to cloud-based applications.
SIP phones are basically open stack solutions that can connect to any compliant SIP platform. Typically, open SIP is most popular in the hosted telephony market where people are looking to embrace digital transformation. While most people believe that proprietary phones offer more features to the end user that could change as new solutions are offered by developers around the world.
“The open SIP phone market continues to grow year-over-year fuelled by hosted and cloud-based communications deployments,” said Mohamed Alaa Saayed, ICT Industry Director, Connected Work and Digital Transformation, Frost & Sullivan. “Over the past two years, Avaya has significantly accelerated its pace of innovation, particularly in cloud-based communications solutions. The investment and product introduction in this growing market is a strategic move from the company which continues to be one of the leading vendors in IP desktop phone shipments and revenues.”
The Avaya Desktop Experience is platform agnostic.“The expansion of our Avaya Desktop Experience portfolio in both breadth and third party unified communications platform support provides an inflection point for UCaaS providers to move beyond generic voice — to positively transform customer experience while increasing employee satisfaction and productivity, accelerating the ability of organizations of all sizes to achieve key business goals, and improve the overall quality of service that is needed for their users.”
The India connection
India has become the new the innovation hub for Avaya, which came out of bankruptcy end of last year. It has successfully completed its debt restructuring less than a year after filing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Today, Avaya is also actively working with niche local start-ups, service providers and integrators in India. The focus areas are Artificial Intelligence, voice recognition and text-to-speech analytics and working on emergency response systems in India.
According to Vishal Agarwal, the company’s India MD in a recent interview to a technology magazine, the firm is collaborating with strategic partners and forming new partnerships to bring solutions quicker to customers. “Working closely and collaborating with the R&D team in India helps us build and deliver innovative solutions which address the specific requirements of the India market. As the industry is moving towards outcome based solutions, Avaya is also building unique solutions for the India,” he said.
— Sufia Tippu is a freelance tech journalist based in India contributing to EE Times India
