This week is the annual "International Avaya Users Group" (IAUG) conference, which is the education and networking event for Avaya's global customer base. At this year's conference, the company announced the new Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment--a single, integrated application to deliver UC and communications enabled applications to any device, over any network. A Developer Preview is available now, with general availability planned at the end of this year.
I've long had the belief that the UC vendors would need to migrate their solutions away from being products that provide discrete applications, to a platform that enables UC capabilities. It's a vision that Avaya has had for years and has approached the market with a strong UC product, the latest of which is Aura, with a middleware layer above it to interface with applications.
The middleware layer has gone through evolutionary steps and is currently composed of the ACE (Agile Communications Environment) software suite that it inherited from the acquisition of Nortel. The ACE suite was complimented with Avaya's DevConnect program and has resulted in hundreds of UC-enabled applications.
The ACE suite on top of Aura was ideally suited for premise deployments and used very traditional APIs, SOA principles and tool kits to enable application developers to build traditional CTI-type applications. While this was possible pre-ACE, many developers told me the speed at which click-to-call type applications could be built was much faster than with legacy methods.
However, times have changed and the world is moving to cloud, virtual, social and mobile. Much of the application industry has migrated away from targeting Web Services and SOA to focusing on developers using RESTful APIs to speed up application development time frames. This shift is the basis of the new Aura Collaboration Environment.
The traditional, layered approach that Avaya has used for years gives way to the new ACE: A single, integrated application platform that enables third party ISVs and corporate developers to build and deploy collaborative applications--without any prior communication development skills. This means more mainstream developers can start to build communications-enabled applications, bringing new ideas and different thinking to this industry.
As part of this initiative, developers will have access to all of the tools they need to start developing Aura-based applications immediately. The Aura Collaboration Environment is built off a concept of rapid and reusable application components so the more applications are developed, the more value it provides to the community at large. There's only so much knowledge Avaya can provide to developers, but a large, active community is needed and, once in place, has almost unlimited potential.
The best example of this in tech today is what F5 Networks has done with its DevCentral community that is the community portal for its iRules scripting language. The combination of iRules and DevCentral has created unparalleled product loyalty for F5 in the application delivery controller (ADC) market, and Avaya should be able to replicate this if it executes properly.
Avaya will introduce a "Cloud Sandbox" that will be in trials by the end of the year, where developers and ISVs can experiment with the Aura Collaboration Environment with no up-front investment. I don't believe Avaya has figured out how they will price the sandbox yet but it will be based on utilization of the service. This can expose many new customers and partners not familiar with Avaya to the company at a relatively low cost.
The UC industry has had the right vision for years--that is a world where agile, communications-enabled applications change the way we work and collaborate with one another. However, the proprietary solutions, ad hoc development tools and overly complex systems have acted as an anchor and held the industry back from fulfilling the promise of the vision that has been laid out.
Avaya has shifted its focus away from being a product optimized for premise deployments, and is taking the steps towards a true platform as a service (PaaS) solution. This is the direction that the UC industry needs to go, and the new Aura Collaboration Environment should have much broader developer appeal than the traditional systems that were really just focused on building traditional CTI applications faster.
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