The Changing Collaboration Landscape

The economic crisis has made businesses rethink their priorities. According to a survey carried out by Avaya in the region, customer loyalty and retention ranked as the topmost priority for most CXO’s and 58% of the respondents considered rolling out Unified Communications in order to achieve that. In tough times, businesses want to be closer to their customers and communications is a critical element when it comes to customer satisfaction and retention. In this interview, Nidal Abou-Ltaif, Area VP – Middle East, Africa, Greece and Turkey, Avaya talks about how collaboration technologies like Unified Communications (UC) are playing an important part in enabling organisations to achieve this.

“Avaya AuraTM – the new architecture from Avaya - is the ideal path to migration to UC. Its multi-vendor approach transforms any existing infrastructure into an on-demand service that provides any user in any location with access to a set of real-time communications services”
-Nidal Abou-Ltaif Area VP – Middle East, Africa, Greece and Turkey Avaya

What business need is driving investments in UC in this region currently?

The need to stay closer to customers during these tough times is driving businesses to adopt UC, because it combines all forms of communications and ensures business continuity. If we are to consider the responses from our survey, over 30 percent of respondents said that their employees missed up to 20 calls a day, which translates into missed business opportunities and customers not being serviced on time. Businesses cannot afford lost opportunities and are turning to UC to enable them to consolidate their communication devices and functions onto one single device, which Avaya Aura^TM does very simply.

As a strategy, can organizations adopt a phased approach to Unified Communications? What are your recommendations in terms of making a start?

A phased approach would in fact be our recommendation. UC is a topic that touches many people, roles and technologies and so a full on, all-at-once UC implementation stands a good chance of failing, and worse still could alienate the people it was designed to help - the end user. Avaya's recommendation would be to divide your users into profiles eg: desk workers, teleworkers, call centre workers, etc and then address the needs of each one at a time. That way you can satisfy their needs properly, and they will also act as internal advocates to spread the benefits of UC to the rest of the organization.

How does Avaya's new Aura architecture help with this phased approach?

Avaya Aura^TM - the new architecture from Avaya - is the ideal path to migration to UC. Its multi-vendor approach transforms any existing infrastructure into an on-demand service that provides any user in any location with access to a set of real-time communications services. Avaya Aura^TM allows users to take advantage of the widest possible array of end user devices - whatever meets their needs most effectively depending on whether they are in office, on the road, at home or another location. This includes deskphones, wireless phones, on-screen soft phones, home phones with VPN, conference phones, headsets and more - designed to exploit all the communications and collaboration capabilities that Avaya Aura^TM delivers. In fact, it enables organizations to reach intelligent communications rapidly and cost effectively.

How can companies continue to migrate from their TDM infrastructure and move to IP at the same time?

With a hybrid approach to telephony Avaya can drive the same features to a TDM telephone as an IP one. This means that customers can continue to use their existing investment when no change is needed, but add IP handsets when expansion is required. Avaya Aura^TM allows companies with a mixed TDM & IP environment to collapse their communications platform onto a single dial plan, allowing IP and TDM users to become part of the same system. Avaya Aura^TM allows a user of a TDM handset to talk to another user over an IP connection to save call charges. This means they save costs on PSTN calls whilst not having to rip-and-replace their back end infrastructure

How is Avaya helping companies deal with the security issues when it comes to using IP and VoIP?

We take the security of VoIP very seriously. We were the first vendor to introduce media encryption as standard across all our IP devices and are still one of the very few mainstream vendors that encrypt every IP call (some vendors have to turn off encryption on conference calls and when systems fall into "fail-over" modes.) Our Aura Communication Manager software has many advanced security features built in to stop toll fraud-things like time-of-day route restriction, call barring etc., to stop staff making calls to numbers and locations that are costly and could pose a security risk. VoIP security is part of a larger picture, and Avaya's professional services and implementation teams look at the bigger picture in helping customers secure their entire network.

Managing the enterprise collaboration platforms efficiently is a key aspect. What management tools do you offer organizations?

Every Avaya solution comes as standard with a comprehensive management suite. This GUI allows even non-technical staff to effectively manage and monitor their entire system. From basic tasks, such as adding and removing users, to much more complex issues, such as the real time monitoring of VoIP quality across a network and flagging drops in quality, they allow a network admin to take action proactively and even for the system to dynamically route traffic around network problems so as to not affect users.

Will the future of enterprise telephony be focused more on software than hardware?

Yes, enterprise telephony is now seen as a software application. Our Aura Communication Manager is an application that runs on industry standard hardware and an industry standard operating system (Linux.) Today we supply the hardware as an appliance to our customers but there are customers requesting a move to a software only solution where they supply the hardware and simply purchase software and licenses from us. The move away from hardware is also happening at the end user front too, with some users (particularly in the call centre) preferring to use a softphone rather than a physical device on the desk.

How is video collaboration now beginning to mesh into the portfolio? Do customers still see it as a standalone, specialized investment?

Although some customers may still see video as a standalone specialized investment, Avaya believes that the majority are now looking at a comprehensive enterprise approach to video which helps avoid the shortcomings posed by point solution products. Avaya Enterprise Video Telephony is a comprehensive set of capabilities that leverage a single best-in-class real-time communications platform to support both the Internal and External consumer experience.

Can you draw up a five point evaluation chart that companies need to look at before starting off on their UC roadmap?

Profile your staff and understand their needs. UC for a mobile worker is very different to UC for a desk worker. Keep staff involved at every stage, a UC implementation will live or die by end user acceptance. Create a single view of your staff - this means a single directory containing phone numbers, e-mail addresses etc so that everyone has access to the same information. Think hard about a mobility strategy. Giving a mobile phone to a worker is NOT a mobility strategy, the device should be integrated into existing systems and devices to be affective (one number, one voice mailbox etc etc.) Open standards are key. There is no single UC vendor. Look for UC vendors that do not impose "lock-ins." UC needs to be network and device independent and work with existing desktop systems and applications. No rip-and-replace. Look for a vendor that will work with existing systems and not force you to start afresh. Rip-and-replace is not only complex but costly too.