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Avaya Snags Top Cisco Telepresence Exec

Avaya's Flare Experience user interface can do a lot of cool things, and now we know it can transport human beings from one place to another. Specifically, it moved Phil Graham from Cisco to Avaya.

In another sign that Avaya wants to be seen as a serious innovator in Unified Communications, the formerly-staid vendor this week hired Graham away from his position as the point person behind Cisco Telepresence, and put him in charge of all endpoints for Avaya. And in an interview yesterday, Graham told me that Flare was a signal that Avaya meant to break new ground in the communications future.

"I think that's why I'm here, frankly," Graham said, calling Flare a "very interesting paradigm of mixing information with applications. And then at the center of that experience is communications."

In announcing Graham's appointment as Vice President, Research and Development, Endpoints, Avaya stated that he will "play a key role in expanding Avaya's focus on next-generation endpoints that improve the user experience and effectiveness of business collaboration." That includes everything from the snazzy but very expensive Desktop Video Device tablet on which Flare made its debut, down to the lowly desktop phone (about which we'll say more shortly). But Graham is a video guy, and that's the major part of his mission with Avaya.

I asked him if his charge is to make Avaya a true videoconferencing vendor on a par with Cisco/Tandberg, Polycom, and their peers; he replied that while he's just beginning to chart a roadmap for video in his new role, the decision to hire someone with his background in video ought to be an indication of the direction that Avaya is heading in this regard. At Cisco, Graham served as VP of Engineering and CTO of that company's TelePresence portfolio, which put him in charge of development for all the TelePresence endpoint, multipoint, recording, and scheduling products.

Graham has a deep history in enterprise video; he came to Cisco from Precept Software, which created one of the first IP video products, and which Cisco acquired in 1998. He pointed out to me that Cisco had no real video product line before acquiring Precept, and subsequently built its interactive video and telepresence capabilities from that foundation. Within one product generation, Cisco had gone from Precept's technology, which was purely streaming IP video, to two-way capabilities.

He believes Avaya can build up its video product capabilities with similar dispatch. Though, again, it's still early in his tenure, he said, "We haven't talked about acquisitions" as a means of hastening Avaya’s path to market with a full-fledged video portfolio. As yet, there are no timetables for developing product offerings.

The biggest knock on the Avaya Desktop Video Device has been its price tag: a $2,000 street price when you include the cost of both the tablet hardware and the Flare software. I asked Phil what he thought of that price, whether he thought it was a model that could gain any traction. While not explicitly endorsing that price point, he said some people want a higher-end device that can support features a $500 tablet can’t.

"I love my iPad, but it's very much a consumption device; trying to create content on it is not very easy, and it only does one thing at a time," Graham said. Also, he said the iPad is "not set up as a device that's for a long video call. It's really set up for a quick little chat."

At the other end of the spectrum, Graham is in charge of the anti-tablet, the quotidian desktop phone. When I asked him what he thinks the future of desk phones is, he conceded that they're, "under challenge because of things like cell phones," but believes that certainly in use cases like call centers where dependable performance and audio quality are a must, "there's still going to be a lot of phones for a long time." He also said he sees the potential to add functionality to the desk phone to "put more information at your fingertips" that echoes the tasks cell phones can do for you—that is, letting you quickly access your calendar, contacts, etc.

Graham believes that Avaya is well positioned to integrate video along with all other endpoint technologies into its call control platform—which could become a kind of holy grail for enterprise communications vendors that are increasingly building platforms whose purpose is to control all communications as "sessions", while being essentially agnostic as to the medium in which those sessions occur. A session could be voice, video, messaging, etc., and the platform—in Avaya’s case, the Aura system—simply sets up the session according to what the endpoints ask for and are capable of delivering. And the medium can evolve within the same session, from instant messaging to voice to video.

"The whole Aura architecture is really about having control of audio and video and collaboration, versus what a lot of implementations are, which is really islands that are loosely fixed together," Graham said.

Ultimately, hiring Graham is, in itself, a signal from Avaya that it intends to continue shedding its image as an old-line telephony player. And the fact that they lured him away from Cisco, Avaya's main competitor and one that’s lately been dogged by doubters, only drives the point home more forcefully. Phil Graham said he'll continue to be a strong advocate for video, as he's been for 17 years, and that Avaya's positioned to take advantage of video's continued growth.

"I do believe every desktop will have video," he said. "We don't [yet] use video enough in our day to day communications. I think Avaya's in the right place at the right time."