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Avaya teaming with VMWare on virtualized collaboration

Avaya is bringing its core unified communications products to VMware-based environments for the first time.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Avaya is rolling out a significant update to its collaboration platform, which includes some collaboration of its own with VMware.

For the first time, Avaya is bringing its core unified communications solutions to VMware-based environments. This specifically concerns Avaya Aura, the company's flagship UC and contact center solutions suite for midsize to large enterprises. 

The major addition with this update is the introduction of a new communications architecture for virtualized UC apps, dubbed Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment (Avaya Aura VE). It is designed accelerate mobile collaboration apps across organization.

This architecture is comprised of six key elements, including a SIP-based sessions manager for on-demand access to collaboration services and apps along with developer interfaces that should provide some room for customizing relevant UC and business apps.

VMware is involved in at least two ways. First, Avaya Aura VE is labeled as "VMware Ready," which is touted to be virtualization software provider's highest level of endorsement for virtualization technologies. This means that businesses using VMware's cloud infrastructure within their data centers can now integrate Avaya Aura apps onto their existing server environments.

Secondly, Avaya integrated VMware's vCenter Server tools for diagnostics, provisioning and traffic management onto Aura VE.

Avaya noted the growing shift within the enterprise world towards virtualized architectures as one of the primary motivations for this partnership. Citing an IDC report from 2011, Avaya argued that 75 percent of organizations believe virtualization is considered to be the default build for new server hardware.

Thus, Avaya asserted that this latest update will offer more cost savings from both an operational and equipment perspective.

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