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Another fall, another set of Cisco unified communications announcements. As usual, Zeus beat me to the punch and wrote the initial post for NoJitter. He points out that the new Cisco software is a shot across Microsoft's bow, but I'd like to paint a portion of the announcement as Cisco seeking to better position itself against Avaya. NoJitter readers will remember Avaya's big Aura announcement earlier this year. Allan Sulkin described it as "a somewhat unique solution that supports enhanced SIP trunking capabilities to reduce customer network costs and enable shared applications across multiple systems, Avaya and non-Avaya alike."Early this month Avaya quietly updated Avaya Aura Session Manager, the centerpiece of the Aura architecture and the workhorse that enables all of Aura's trunk consolidation, single dial plan, and other capabilities. The Session Manager update delivers support for application sequencing, the ability to write a voice application and make it immediately available to end stations regardless of which vendor's PBX they are attached to. At VoiceCon, the demo of this was an application written and, through Session Manager, accessible to a Cisco phone connected to a Cisco Unified Communications Manager PBX which in turn was connected to Avaya Aura Session Manager. The new Session Manager software also supports the direct connection of SIP end points to Session Manager servers, as well as the ability for PBX systems to act as features servers that deliver feature sets to any phone on the network, not just those directly attached to them. These were all capabilities previously announced as part and parcel to the Aura architecture when Avaya launched it in the spring, but none were supported or generally available until now.

As part of an update Avaya gave industry analysts a little while back, the company said that 27 customers have deployed Session Manager to date. This is not bad for such a new product, particularly one delivering SOA and IMS capabilities in a way rather different from other business communications solutions on the market. One of the early adopters was at VoiceCon, unofficially manning the Avaya booth and fielding questions on its Aura implementation. Despite the network architect's badge being emblazoned with his company's name, I was later told the customer wishes to remain anonymous. Regardless, it is trunk reduction, least-cost routing, and a common dial plan across a large, complex multi-vendor PBX and contact center environment that led this large Fortune 50 company to deploy Avaya Aura Session Manager. The architect claimed that operational cost reductions paid off his investment in new Avaya technology in a matter of weeks...three, I think. Or maybe five. I wasn't taking close notes, I'm afraid.

This benefit of Avaya Aura Session Manager--reducing costs by building a communications architecture that eliminates the number of trunks needed--is so compelling that Cisco this week introduced its own version of the Avaya solution. It's called Unified Communications Manager Session Manager Edition, details of which can be found here and here. (Search for "session manager" on that second link to get to the right part.) Cisco's new session manager offering "is essentially a Unified CM cluster with trunk interfaces only and with no IP endpoints [that] enables aggregation of multiple unified communications systems." This is not perfectly analogous to the Avaya solution. There seems to be no use of IMS or SOA, which are foundational technologies for Avaya's Session Manager. As a result, the Cisco solution doesn't seem to leave room for the feature server and application sequencing capabilities that are part of the more advanced Avaya offering. And at first glance Unified Communications Manager Session Manager Edition seems to require more servers compared to Avaya Aura Session Manager. However the Cisco Session Manager solution seems to provide a viable alternative for Cisco customers enamored of the trunk reduction and management simplification benefits of Aura Session Manager, and for this reason could help Cisco prevent too many of its customers' heads turning in the direction of Basking Ridge when it comes to this new class of communications solution. Follow me on Twitter!This benefit of Avaya Aura Session Manager is so compelling that Cisco this week introduced its own version of the Avaya solution.

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