Avaya and Lenovo team up on VoIP

Avaya and Lenovo have announced a partnership to enhance IP communications on ThinkPad notebooks, the companies announced on Wednesday.

The partnership will see Lenovo's fingerprint reader and password manager technologies used to provide biometric authentication for Avaya's IP softphone software on Lenovo's Thinkpad notebooks.

According to Peter Hortensius, senior vice president of Lenovo's notebook business unit, the partnership will "allow users to take their office phone with them on their PCs and securely make calls while at home or on the road".

Avaya's vice president of unified communications, Eileen Rudden, added on Wednesday that the partnership would bring "click-to-call" integration with Microsoft Office Communicator and IBM Lotus SameTime.

Integration will be complete during the third quarter of 2007, the companies said.

Avaya also announced "broad enhancements" to its VoIP platform, in the shape of version 4.0 of its Communication Manager software and three models of its next-generation one-X "deskphones", which are essentially hardware gateways into the VoIP software.