At the Avaya partner conference in Las Vegas last week, I had a chance to sit down with senior VP Alan Baratz, and the main thing I wanted to learn was the status and prospects for Flare, the flashy user interface that Avaya announced with great fanfare last year.
Flare is about to become available in the Apple iTunes store, and when Baratz announced the impending release from the stage at the partner show, it drew the biggest spontaneous burst of applause of anything presented. Flare is a unique touch-screen, drag-and-drop way of initiating and manipulating single- and multi-party sessions of voice, video and messaging, but for its first year of life it's been a bird in a gilded cage--trapped on the pricey ($1,500+) Avaya Desktop Video Device (ADVD) tablet as its only hardware platform.
Getting Flare onto the iPad is the first step toward getting it to the masses, or at least to more people than currently use it. I asked Baratz how many people outside Avaya currently use Flare on a regular basis, and he conceded that, while the Flare on ADVD is deployed at "hundreds of customer sites," there are typically just "small numbers of devices per customer."
Baratz predicted that Flare's deployment numbers "will go up pretty dramatically pretty quickly" once it comes out for the iPad. Flare requires Avaya Aura 6.0 to communicate with, but one of the messages at the Vegas event was Aura 6.0's rapid growth, from zero to 3 million end stations enabled in less than a year, with a fast ramp expected to continue.
However, it's still unclear what the economics of Flare will be for an enterprise that may be considering a large-scale rollout. Though demo licenses will be a free download, a permanent license will cost extra, on top of the Aura licenses you've already bought, and on top of the licenses you've already bought for any other Avaya endpoints you have. And in Vegas last week, Baratz wouldn't say what the cost of a permanent Flare license will be.
Avaya hopes that getting Flare into the iTunes store will help build grassroots adoption: "We believe this will start to create employee pull for the product," Baratz said. And clearly, Flare has its appeal; in addition to an interface that many users will find a more intuitive way to manage call handling for multimedia sessions, it becomes an immediate solution for enterprises wanting to extend mobility while keeping endpoints (iPads, at least) on the corporate network.
As far as Flare's future, Baratz's team is already working on the next round of feature/functions, which center around scheduled conferencing and the addition of web conferencing; the current iteration of Flare is really about real-time transfers, additions, etc. That would make Flare a more all-encompassing interface, which is probably a necessary step if the world does move toward truly unified communications.
