Avaya's Baratz: Real-time Communications Need Control of E-Mail, More Simplicity

Real-time communications are the best way for knowledge workers to get their jobs done, but those communications need to be infused with the controls we see in email today. That was the word from Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of global communications solutions at Avaya, who gave the opening keynote address this morning at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

 

According to Baratz, knowledge workers communicate via long, rich, lasting communications and short, immediate communications. The former can be met with audio and video conferencing and live meetings. The latter is addressed by email, texting and Twitter today.

 

But while email is pervasive, an Accenture study reveals that 18- to 24-year-old workers would also prefer to be able communicate at work via IM, blogs, videoblogs, Twitter and social networking. Also, Baratz added, email can be a waste of time.

 

What businesses need are solutions that take the control aspect of email and infuse it into the real-time world of communications. That means it would allow people to easily set up meetings and easily store, index, retrieve, thread and, within the application, share documents.

 

“That gluing together diff communications mechanisms to get things done we think is very powerful,” he said.

 

“It’s not about everything, it’s about the right set with the right control,” he added.

 

Baratz said Avaya is doing that through the real-time Avaya Aura infrastructure product it introduced five months ago. It’s a SIP-based platform that is completely based on sessions. It allows for a quick ROI, third party and sequenced apps, and more. MorganStanley is among the customers currently using this solution.

 

Avaya this month will deliver the second release of aura, adding more ROI-related features as well as user registration so devices automatically register, and so the users’ profiles follow them despite what devices they are using.

 

The company also this morning demoed a Web-based call center support application that allows the customer to input and the customer service rep to access data via a Web-based portal, to initiate a conference with the same interface, and bring in additional individuals through that interface.

 

Baratz also talked about how while CIOs would like to get rid of one of the three devices prevalent on most knowledge workers’ desks – that device being the wireline phone – users like their phones. So Avaya is reinventing what the phone does and is making the phone a chameleon with broadband functionality. Avaya will be announcing more details on that front in the next six to nine months, he said.

 

From video perspective, he said, Avaya focused on delivering high-quality, low-bandwidth video all way down to desktop and also on simplifying the customer experience around it.