BASKING RIDGE, NJ, March 20, 2012 -- Avaya, a global provider in business communications and collaboration systems and services, today announced it has received Frost & Sullivan's 2011 North American Product Differentiation Award for Enterprise Session Management. The award was given based on the industry analyst firm's assessment of the Avaya Aura(R) unified communications architecture against similar offers in the market.

In the assessment, Avaya scored an overall 9.4 out of a possible ten for five categories of measurement: features and functionality, quality and complexity, customization, match to market needs and brand perception. Highlighted areas that contributed to Avaya Aura's score include:

Unique Features and Functionality -- Avaya's unified communications architecture optimizes communications environments to reap the operational and end-user benefits of centralization and SIP trunk consolidation. Moreover, it provides a highly flexible end-user services capability, unique to Avaya for the enterprise market, which allows applications and network facilities to be assignable to all users on an individual basis, regardless of location or affiliation with a particular call server.

Quality and Complexity -- Avaya Aura session management solutions are devised to help reduce the complexity of operating and managing a multi-vendor environment. Centralization is key to this architecture in terms of SIP trunk aggregation and greatly streamlining maintenance, management and administration. By contrast, Frost & Sullivan notes that competing solutions often require a number of discrete utilities to support the same breadth of platforms.

Customization -- At its core, the Avaya Aura architecture is intended for customization to leverage each customer's unique assets and requirements, and to provide flexibility in the way they implement and evolve their solutions over time. The SIP-based Avaya Aura session management solution is certified to support several models of widely deployed third-party PBX platforms as well as SIP trunking services from many Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs). Avaya ACE can be employed to further expand the range of communications applications and enterprise business software platforms that can be integrated into the overall solution.

Avaya Aura(R) is the core communications platform supporting unified communications and contact center solutions for midsize to large enterprises providing SIP-based session management. Avaya Aura enables faster and easier deployment of communications capabilities such as voice, video, messaging, and presence. This announcement highlights Avaya's commitment to bring The Power of We(TM) to every Avaya customer, helping businesses to drive faster collaboration, smarter decisions and better business results.

"The most successful vendors demonstrate product differentiation excellence by identifying emerging enterprise requirements and demonstrating continual innovation. Today, Avaya Aura continues to be on top of mind when enterprise session management is discussed. The solution's capabilities continue to be the benchmark by which alternatives are measured."
--Rob Arnold, Senior Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

"Enterprises today deal with an enormous number of issues, not the least of which is choosing the right technology that moves their business forward. We designed Avaya Aura as a foundation from which they can quickly realize productivity and cost benefits as they phase in new capabilities that also offer the freedom to innovate in ways which can set them apart from the rest. The new Avaya Aura 6.2 release builds on the qualities identified by Frost & Sullivan, with added scalability, SIP features, and reliability for customers deploying Avaya's business collaboration solutions."
--Gary Barnett, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Collaboration Platforms, Avaya

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com