I have read too many recent articles that are confusing Avaya Aura™, or just plain Aura, with an actual product. Aura is a brand name that Avaya chose as a marketing tool, nothing else. It is like Jello™ or Kleenex™, a brand name associated with many distinct products that often share some degree of commonality. Just as there are many Jello brand desserts and many Kleenex brand paper products there are now many Aura brand enterprise communications products .Use of the term Aura in writings or presentations must include some level of specificity as to what product or solution is being referenced. Simply using Avaya Aura or Aura is meaningless (at least to me).The confusion about Aura has likely occurred because Avaya introduced it at the same time it announced its new Session Manager and System Manager products. Aura is used by Avaya as a prefix to the Session Manager and System Manager names, but it is also currently used with earlier Avaya offerings, such as the newly renamed Aura Communication Manager, its flagship IP telephony system generic software. A PowerPoint slide in the announcement presentation deck titled "Avaya Aura Architecture" appears to include the entire range of Avaya offerings, including servers, media gateways, endpoints, and application software, networked together in a cohesive and intelligent manner. The visual nature of the slide conveys the meaning of the Avaya Aura Architecture concept. Simply titling the slide "Avaya Aura" would have been a mistake.
The choice of the Aura brand name for Avaya is a good one. The initial and closing letters are the same; it is distinctive for the market; and many people associate the word with a special glow or luminescence (something positive). Aura can also mean, according to a dictionary definition, a distinctive and pervasive quality or character. Avaya did not explain how it came to select the new brand name nor should they have. It is probably better for customers to associate their own impression of the word with Avaya products rather than have it precisely defined. For example I don't recall the company explaining their name when it was spun-off from Lucent Technologies, but I assume it was selected for its look, i.e. the parallel lines of the letters capital A and lower case v and y. I'm not sure if anyone else agrees with this assumption or even cares how or why Avaya was chosen as the new entity's name. Perhaps some people think it was named after our 50th state (Hawaii, for those who forgot their grade school history lessons). I doubt anyone thinks it is associated with Ravaya, a Sri Lankan newspaper.
With too many competitors and their brother using the word "Unified" to name or describe their current enterprise communications offerings, Avaya Aura stands out from the pack. Maybe I'm being picky, but please use the term correctly as a brand name prefix to a specific Avaya product. I thank you (and assume that Avaya would thank you as well).
