Interview: Avaya's Alan Baratz on UC
"For Avaya, Unified Communications is bringing together all the modes of communications into an environment that's efficient, effective and fun for the user."
Doing interviews for No Jitter is an incredible opportunity, as I get the opportunity to meet with the movers and shakers of the industry. This time, Dr. Alan Baratz of Avaya. Dr. Baratz currently carries the title senior vice president, and president of Avaya Global Communications Solutions (GCS). His organization includes three of the company's strategic business units: Unified Communications, Contact Center, and Small/Medium Enterprise Communications.
Prior to Avaya, Dr. Baratz was the Senior Vice President for Cisco's Network Software and Systems Technology Group. And before that, he served as President of Sun Microsystems' Software division, with responsibility for all of Sun's software products as well as software sales and marketing. He also held leadership positions at IBM and served as CEO of several information technology startups.
Dr. Baratz holds both a doctorate and a master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from UCLA.
Alan is a great presenter. I've had the benefit of hearing a few of his presentations, so some of these questions came from those and the rest are aimed at Avaya in general.
DM: SIP seems central to Avaya's strategy and its positioning, yet SIP is widely supported in the industry. How is Avaya's vision of SIP different?
AB: SIP is widely supported by the industry, yet we are one of the few UC providers that can deliver a single infrastructure that supports all the modes of communication accessed through a truly integrated end user client--including voice, video and real-time data. This is an important differentiation. We are leveraging SIP for integrating voice, video and real-time data, as well as to separate control from media. This will bring to bear a whole new set of capabilities that enable technology to conform to users instead of the other way around. With the Avaya Aura implementation of SIP, it is much easier to control communications using whatever device you want to use for control, but then leverage the most optimal media infrastructure available where you are. For example, if you have a very high quality speakerphone in your office, you can set up the call on your Avaya Desktop Video Device (ADVD) or your PC and, say, send it over to that device. This requires the ability to control with one device, and place media on another device. You're going to see us leverage this significantly across our product line. Cross control is an area that we think is actually going to be quite compelling as we look to the future.
From a contact center perspective, the ability to create and hold a single session throughout the entire collaboration with the client is unique to Avaya Aura Contact Center. Other solutions attempt to solve the problem with integration, but where that breaks down is in the inability to support the evolution from routing to matching. Imagine this use case--I contact any service provider and start a chat. They can't resolve my issue without using different media so I am offered click-to-call to be transferred to an agent. This is best in class today. In the future, the session-based architecture enables a seamless change-out to the most optimal modality choice for the company while preserving the chosen modality of the customer. Moreover, the context information, i.e. buying history, demographics, social media interactions, helps ensure the session matches the customer in order to create a superior buying experience at the lowest possible cost.
DM: In terms of collaboration, what does Avaya mean by "People First" Collaboration?
AB: Most collaboration tools today are document-centric. They are based on document sharing as the fundamental starting point, whether it is WebEx, Go to Meeting, or SharePoint. The problem is they lose sight of the fact that collaboration is all about people. It is about getting the right people together with the right information in an environment that allows them to solve a critical business problem. Document sharing is only a very small part of it. We facilitate getting the people together along with the information they need to get the job done--which ultimately, should also be device-, network- and location-agnostic.
