There were several highlights at the Avaya Evolutions event in San Mateo, CA last week--listening to Steve Wozniak discuss how he and Steve Jobs first met and founded Apple; watching Avaya's Brett Shockley ride a unicycle while Wozniak rode a Segway; and of course getting my iPhone signed by the Woz himself. But aside from the famed "Dancing With the Stars" dancer, there was lots of good information being shared, as well as several new announcements from Avaya--mostly around video.
Perhaps the biggest announcement (and certainly the best demo of the event) was the integration of UC and room based systems, as well as the use of video on tablets, smartphones, and PCs. Avaya demonstrated how it is "extending the community of endpoints" for video, by adding video to the Flare Experience across a variety of devices. Avaya Aura Conferencing with Avaya Flare Experience 1.1 now has multipoint video capabilities based on Radvision Scopia available for iOS and Windows desktops.
The conferencing solution supports up to 7,500 concurrent sessions or up to 75,000 users, based on a Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-enabled switched video architecture. During his presentation, Gary Barnett stated that the Avaya solution uses 83% less bandwidth than Microsoft, and 63% less than Cisco.
Other announcements include:
* Interoperability between Scopia and Avaya IP Office. IP Office 8.1 now supports HD Scopia, providing more options for mid-sized organizations.
* Avaya Client Applications plug-ins for Microsoft Lync, Outlook and Office integration--Avaya Client Applications are plug-ins that let Avaya Aura integrate with Microsoft Lync/OCS, Office, Internet Explorer and Dynamics (as well as IBM Sametime and Salesforce.com) for real-time collaboration. Until now, Avaya ACE was required to integrate Avaya Aura with Lync, but now customers can do the integration simply by using the plug-ins.
* Scopia Mobile on Android (iPhones and iPads are already supported).
* The Scopia TIP Gateway-enabled integration with Cisco (Tandberg), LifeSize, and Polycom, to support and integrate with customers' existing telepresence solutions.
* Scopia Management System adds a browser-based interface for managing a video collaboration deployment from PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets.
Here's a quick demonstration by Avaya's Lloyd Halverson of the Avaya Flare Experience using IM, presence, video, chat, collaboration, etc. across various endpoints with a single user interface.
