At VoiceCon this week Avaya unveiled its new Aura vision, architecture and related products. This architecture promotes thinking about communication differently and should help accelerate the adoption of VoIP and UC since this architecture scales much easier than the way traditional communications was deployed and frankly, I think it's long overdue from the vendor community.I've been covering VoIP and UC now for many years and I've always believed that voice over IP was never about converging networks together. Converging networks together is a benefit of VoIP, since most of our other applications run over IP but the big payoff to VoIP is that voice can now be transported at the IP layer. The reason this is important is that it radically simplifies the deployment of communications.
Traditional voice had to be done at layer two meaning every corporate location had to have its own voice infrastructure. The decision on what PBX or key system to use was done on a node by node basis, creating very little user experience consistency from location to location. Dial plans and other configurations were very difficult to keep in sync (and often not) and overall maintenance and administration was a huge headache and very costly. Layer 2 communications meant high quality voice but a very high TCO.
In theory, migrating to VoIP should have meant much of this complexity has been removed, but it hasn't been, for a number of reasons. For the most part, when I talk to organizations that are deploying IP based systems, architecturally they are still thinking with Layer 2 in mind rather trying to re-architect the network to take advantage of IP. Almost every other application that uses IP as its transport mechanism is deployed with centralized software that is distributed to branches and mobile workers over the corporate WAN. For example, when a company deploys a web application, the web servers are located in the corporate data center, not a wiring closet, and the end points are able to fetch the information over the network (assuming it's configured correctly). It doesn't matter where the user is or where the servers are, the communication between the client and server is maintained because of IP.
The architecture behind Avaya's Aura follows the same deployment model of today's web and IP based applications: A centralized architecture based on standards based, loosely coupled components. This architecture is similar to the way network operators use IMS to help scale their IP based communications services. The architecture behind Aura is significantly simpler than traditional communications and will allow enterprises to scale deployments much faster than they have before.
It's worth noting that there have been other vendors that have had products that were open and based on standards, most notably the Siemens HiPath 8000 and 3Com's VCX. In fact, both of these products were originally designed to be carrier soft-switches meaning they were designed to operate in an IMS like framework. However, neither vendor really tried to push a new architecture on the industry to support the need for this type of product.
Although much of the vendor community has talked about "open" and "SIP," very few have truly embraced it. Most of the vendor solutions you find on the market today are built on SIP principles but are highly customized and have a lot of integration with other products in the portfolio, creating a level of vendor lock in that's obviously very appealing. However, I do believe that it's held the communications industry back.
While on the surface it's easy to get caught in the trap that open and standards based communications will commoditize and remove all the value out of this industry, it's just not true. In fact, it will have the opposite effect. When the computing industry moved away from the locked in mainframe industry to a much more open, client server model, the computing industry exploded. While the relative share of computing moved away from IBM, the overall pie got so much bigger it created so much more opportunity for IBM and a number of other companies. Similarly, an open IMS like approach to communications will make it possible to integrate voice and many of the UC tools we use into all of the corporate applications we use today.
The vision that Avaya is promoting with Aura shouldn't be thought of as an Avaya only vision but one that the industry should embrace. If adopted industry wide, it might mean lower overall share for some of the vendors but a much bigger overall communications pie to cut the share from--and isn't that what the whole industry should want?
