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AWS as Private Data Center Alternative
AWS is also in the process of becoming an option for businesses purchasing and managing their own UC software, so it's not just for providers launching UC services. Taking a step backward for a moment, most UC software can run as an instance on a virtualized server that most likely resides in a data center. This can be less expensive than running the software on commercial off-the-shelf servers or on dedicated appliances. But it requires the enterprise to purchase, support, and manage a lot of data center technology. IaaS -- whether via AWS or some other offering -- makes managing the OS, networking, storage, and virtualization someone else's problem. (PaaS goes a step further by rolling in middleware and runtime.)
As far as I can tell, AWS deployment isn't a supported option for Cisco UC Manager, Microsoft Skype for Business Server, and most other UC software that would otherwise be deployed either on prem or in the corporate data center. Unify demonstrated OpenScape running on AWS many moons ago. Since then neither customers nor partners have requested to deploy OpenScape this way, so Unify never made the option generally available. However, the company says it's available on request.
But two months ago Avaya quietly added AWS as a fully supported deployment option. Avaya customers purchase licenses as usual, but instead of installing the software on premises or in a private cloud, they run it in AWS. According to Avaya documentation, Aura components that can run in AWS include:
Aura's conferencing and messaging software is conspicuously absent from the deployment guide. That is, the guide says that Communication Manager and other apps deployed in AWS can connect to Aura Conferencing and Avaya Messaging deployed on premises. But I've been told that all Aura applications can now run in AWS, with the sole exception of contact center. So maybe the guide is out of date. Or maybe Avaya has a separate deployment guide specific to messaging and conferencing.
As for Avaya's contact center apps, Oceana can currently run on Google Cloud. An AWS support option is expected for later this year, and Avaya mentioned planned support for Azure at its customer conference earlier this year.
So the big question is whether AWS will be the next big step in UC software deployment. Over the past few years we've seen UC software move from purpose-built hardware to commercial off-the-shelf servers to virtual machines. The virtualization stage was particularly interesting because vendors worked on it for several years before cracking the code that let real-time comms apps run on VMware and other hypervisors. But once one vendor got it to work properly, the rest followed suit within a year or so.
It seems that AWS support should be similar. There's certainly some pent-up demand; finding forum posts from IT managers trying to get Cisco, Mitel, and other UC software running on AWS is easy enough. The question is whether that demand is finally great enough for AWS support to become table stakes in the same way VMware and Citrix support did a few years back.
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