Absent from Dreamforce, Avaya pitched its speech analytics and "awareness" capabilities at Oracle's big event.

I happened to be in San Francisco last week on other business and decided to spend a morning at Oracle's Openworld. While I've been to three Salesforce.com Dreamforce events--to speak in contact center sessions and meet with contact center solution providers--I'd never been to Openworld. I was surprised then to find I was considered an Openworld "Alumni" by virtue of my attendance at two RightNow User Group conferences. (Oracle announced its intention to purchase RightNow on the first day of last October's event.)

Having already spent a few days in the Bay Area, one way I was measuring show activity was asking taxi drivers what kind of week they were having. Using that admittedly informal barometer, cab drivers said they were a lot busier during Dreamforce this year. My own observations are that although there was a lot of Openworld disruption to traffic flow in San Francisco--from closed streets for coffee break areas to parties (obnoxiously I think) taking over Union Square--Openworld 2012 seemed quieter than the Dreamforce events I have attended.

Avaya, not an exhibitor at Salesforce.com like many other contact center solution providers (e.g., Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, inContact, and LiveOps to name a few), did have a presence at Openworld. While there I saw an interesting demonstration of Avaya Speech Analytics (based on last year's Aurix acquisition) as well as two different clients (Windows and iPad) displaying what Avaya has been referring to as "awareness."

In the video below, I ask SVP and GM of Avaya Applications and Emerging Technologies Brett Shockley the following questions about Avaya's participation at Openworld.

* Why does Avaya have what seems to be a significant presence at Openworld?

* One of the things being demonstrated in the booth is the awareness concept, that Avaya started talking about at Enterprise Connect 2012. Can you tell us, Where is awareness in the path from concept to actually getting it into the marketplace?

* I'm hearing you talk about text-based awareness. What about video and speech?

The net of Brett's answer on when the world will see Avaya Awareness as a delivered solution is that attributes of awareness will be released as new features in existing Avaya collaboration solutions, such as Flare Experience for Windows and iPad or Avaya Aura Conferencing. Awareness won't be a standalone product as much as it will be enhancement for other solutions.