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Camping with Avaya

Last week Avaya's user group (IAUG) held its annual conference in Boston. Co-located with this event was the "Avaya ACE Codecamp Mini-Hackathon" sponsored by Avaya and co-sponsored by CRI, a systems integrator that is one of the many technology partners of Avaya's DevConnect program. For those that don't know DevConnect, it's Avaya's developer forum and is the most mature and, in my opinion, the best developer program of all the UC solution providers. Avaya has been working on this program for years and I believe it's the company's best opportunity to create long-term sustainable competitive advantage over Cisco and Microsoft.

The concept behind DevConnect is to allow third party developers to create UC-enabled applications that sit on top of Avaya's UC software to create unique applications. While this has always been the vision, the program was given a shot in the arm when the company acquired Nortel and ACE was brought into the fold. ACE is a great application suite and was a perfect complement to the structure put in place by Avaya. Much of what can be done in ACE could have been done before, but ACE uses protocols, like voice-XML (VXML), making developer tasks much faster and simpler than in the old CTI days. ACE also extends what developers can do past voice and adds presence, mobility, session management and other things related to this modern era of voice.

The Codecamp was Avaya's way of demonstrating just how easy this was. The program was a 36-hour session that started off with training and then turned the developers loose to create whatever they could dream up. I was brought in as a judge to pick a couple of winners from the coding done in roughly 16 hours, (including time for sleep). Each participant was given access to ACE, an iPad running the Flare interface and a 1X phone.

The Codecamp participants were a good mix of internal IT and 3rd party developers including: Starfish Associates, PNC Bank, Amcom Software, Infosys Online, Servion, NIC, Aetna, SimpliCTI, Merril, NACR and a number of Avaya developers.

I sat through a presentation from each person and then was tasked with picking a winner and I must admit, I was impressed with how much work most of the groups got done in the limited time available.

The first winning bid was from SimpliCTI, who created a number of session based voice applications including a power dialer, voice blaster and a presence based call center help application. You could almost consider these to be a collection of voice and presence enabled widgets that could be snapped into another application. To demonstrate it, SimpliCTI integrated the widgets into salesforce.com. The thing I liked about this was that the company wasn't setting out to build another application but instead wrote software that could be integrated into applications that workers currently use. The spokesperson from SimpliCTI told me the VXML and session management capabilities made the process much easier than if they had to use traditional CTI methods (and by their company name, I believe them!)

The other winning application was created by internal developers for PNC Bank, although the application had nothing to do with the banking vertical. One of the developers is married to a lawyer from a small law firm. Because she's at a small firm, she doesn't have the same call management tools available to her that other lawyers do so he's convinced she's leaving thousands of dollars a year on the table because she can't track and bill for all the calls correctly.

What the developer built was an ACE based application that can monitor calls, connect them to certain accounts using caller ID and then automatically bill it. The software could be deployed as an internal application or as a hosted service. I actually had a thought while at the event that someone could take this application, push it into the cloud and then offer a client billing service to all small law firms, of which there are thousands of in this country. Luckily, we live in one of the most litigious countries, so there's no shortage of opportunity for this type of service. Again, from concept to working model with only a few hours of coding, previously an impossible task with old CTI developer tools.

There were lots of other good examples, including one from Infosys that enabled call distribution through Remedy. Additionally, Amcon outlined a presence-based application for hospitals that could connect clinicians with hospital equipment. The thing I liked about it was that it extended the use of ACE to presence and further extended presence to things like medical equipment. I actually liked this solution a lot but it didn't win since it was primarily vision with very little coding having been done, so it was hard to justify the prize.

We did give one honorable mention to a developer from Avaya Mexico that had created some basic iPhone applications that had the idea of connecting people to resources. For example, it could show someone jobs that were available and then highlight a presence indicator when there was someone available to discuss the job. Interesting vision and made possible by the ACE suite.

So, Codecamp is now in the books and I thought it was a great example of what ACE is a capable of. My recommendation to Avaya would be to lengthen the development time as it would help move much of the vision we saw turned into actual applications.

Overall a well run event and Kudos to Eric Rossman, Jon Alperin and CRI for a well run event.