Avaya one-X
Avaya defines unified communications as being "the convergence of real-time and non-real-time business communication applications" and the company stresses that the important aspect is that all those applications -- including telephony, conferencing, e-mail, voice mail, IM, video and collaboration – be available on a wide variety of interfaces.
The company's client-facing UC interfaces are being branded with the Avaya "one-X" trademark and all have a very similar graphical design. A hallmark of Avaya's UC position is the way it strives to make its wares work with third-party products. They are really trying to demonstrate their viewpoint that enterprises can make better use of the products they already have.
The company seems driven by providing enterprises with the pieces that are needed to create a custom-built, UC solution instead of saying, "Here's our UC package and here's what you can do with it." This, inevitably, makes their catalog appear more "bits and pieces," but we found that those bits and pieces all work well together and it allows for the creation of customized architectures that you would not get in off-the-shelf designs.
On the Desktop
The Avaya one-X Desktop is a softphone thick client that is installed on Windows PCs and can be distributed from Microsoft management servers.
The one-X Desktop is a SIP client that shows call history, messaging and all other common UC features including presence. It primarily uses the G.711 codec and allows workers to use their desk phone "in tandem" with their computer when in the office while also enabling them to direct their voice path to other phones when they are elsewhere.
The user interface shows call history and messages. It alerts you when you have voice mails but it takes an extra step to actually retrieve, and play back. Voicemails can be deleted right from the interface and they can be replicated directly to Blackberry smartphones.: The system can synchronize with the Blackberry and continually update voice mails so messages can be heard even in areas without cellular signal. In essence, Avaya one-X adds a voice part to the robust Blackberry e-mail functionality and provides other unique voice mail features including a visual list of messages, allowing testers to select the calls we wished to hear first.
Unfortunately, the Blackberry-related one-X features do not provide messaging or presence through the handheld device
Home Away from Home
The Avaya one-X Portal, a Web-based application that comes with a built-in H.323 softphone, is designed in keeping with the Avaya UC philosophy - a person's location is less important than his or her ability to get things done. The one-X portal allows workers to access their company's communication services from virtually anywhere via a VPN SSL Web connection.
The portal is designed to "complement" the use of an Avaya desk phone when employees are in the office and to allow communication from any Internet connection when they are off site. Indeed, the portal provides an easy access to telephony, conferencing, IM and contact information, and it does so with a pleasant graphical interface which was intuitive regardless of the device being used.
From the portal, we were able to easily access conferencing services, saw which calls were missed, viewed our voicemail messages and faxes. The message-waiting indicator, a icon that flashes at the bottom of the Web portal page, and the click-to-call functionality was helpful. Unlike the thick-client, desktop version, the Portal did not provide presence capability.
As is the case with the Alcatel UC product, Avaya's telephony-centric one-X Portal stumbled a bit when it came to e-mail. You can get to the mail application, usually Outlook or Notes, but doing so is not as seamless as we'd prefer.
Going Mobile
The mobile component of Avaya's UC lineup, appropriately called one-X Mobile, comes in a variety of flavors. There are releases for Palm, Java, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian Dual-Mode, Symbian Single-Mode and Windows Mobile 5. We checked out the Symbian Single-Mode, Symbian Dual-Mode, RIM and Windows versions.
The interfaces for all were the same, clean one-X designs that are found on all Avaya's offerings. Obviously, there are differences between devices, so there are subtle changes. All have a "Visual Voice mail" feature that brings to voice mail many review and management functions normally found on e-mail. The mobile devices running one-X Mobile reflect the voice mail status of your one-X phone back in the office. Similarly, the mobile software enables searches of, and additions to the corporate directory.
A cornerstone of UC, one-number functionality, is present. That means workers have just one phone number and can decide where calls will be directed.
The mobile one-X does not bring a presence capability for the Windows and Symbian versions, but sometimes -- especially when you're out and about -- that's a good thing.
"Real" Phones
Avaya's hard endpoints - otherwise known as telephones - come in many varieties. We looked at the 1600, 4600 9600 and 3600 series, which work wirelessly.. Like most other wireless phones, Avaya's does a decent job. There's a slight latency, but no worse than that found in other vendors' 802.11 entries, and the phones are good enough for most business applications.
However, the sound quality of Avaya's next-generation wireless phone, the Samsung-built 3631, was substantially better. There was no latency and sound quality was crystal clear, and the phone has a nice color screen. It took awhile to get used to waiting for a phone to boot-up, a process that took about a minute. For old-timers, booting telephones is still an odd concept.
We found the Avaya 9600 wireline desktop phones to be pretty impressive, especially the 9640, since the entire faceplate is removable and can be replaced with a number of different colored or custom designed, plates -- for example, your company logo. Also, the 9640's color screen yielded beautifully crisp detail. We were shown how the phones’ displays could be customized by professional services for specific businesses: A 9640 installed in a stadium luxury box can be used to display photos of food (that were clear enough to actually look appetizing) and place orders. Video camera feeds can be displayed, they support the wideband codec and their audio quality was fantastic.
At the low end of the 9600 line is the 9610, a bare-bones, basic lobby phone with no speaker phone and a single port. Other models in the 9600 family have larger screens, a 10/100 integrated switch, are gigahertz capable and some support Bluetooth.
The 4600 series includes four models: featuring either color or black and white screens, headsets in place of handsets for call center and other operator type applications and 10/100/1000 switch ports Of note: The 46-10, -21 and -25 models are also available as VPN endpoints. VPN functionality is built into the phone, eliminating an additional VPN tunneling device.
For all their endpoints Avaya offers a plethora of headsets, both wired and wireless, as well as Bluetooth.
Rob Smithers is CEO of Miercom Consulting and Integration www.miercom.com and provides independent testing services for No Jitter. He can be reached at [email protected].
