Current IP-PBX Systems: Avaya

Avaya
Avaya was spun off from Lucent Technologies in the year 2000, so that the company now provides voice and data network products primarily for enterprise customers. Through its acquisition of Octel, Avaya is the world's largest supplier of voice mail systems.

When the early IP-PBXs first came onto the market, from data switch suppliers, Avaya appeared officially to denigrate these products and to emphasize the power of its Definity systems. After a period of uncertainty about its direction, the company now describes the migration to IP telephony as being "an imperative and a necessary strategy for business."

Avaya introduced a family of media servers and gateways in mid-2002, as its second generation of IP telephony systems, under the name Enterprise Class IP Solutions (ECLIPS). All the features of the Definity range of PBXs and contact center functions are implemented with MultiVantage software that runs in these servers. Some of the capabilities of the three media servers are summarized in Table 1.



Avaya defines the call processing power of its systems by the number of busy hour call completions (BHCC), which very much depends on the complexity of the processing for each call. For this reason the BHCC number is lower by a factor of two-fifths for contact center calls than for the general mix of calls.

Avaya sells three different softphone packages—one for a desktop or laptop PC, another for pocket PCs that use Windows CE software, and also the IP Agent, which is intended for contact center personnel. There are five IP phones in Avaya's 46xx range, all with built-in speakerphone and power over the LAN technology. The most expensive model has a full-color, touch-sensitive screen for Web access browsing and six integrated telephony-related applications. A three-port switch base is available for three of the Avaya IP phones, so that a PC can share one LAN outlet with the desktop phone. All of these phones, except the basic model, have an infrared port for communication with a PC or PDA.

Avaya has developed its reputation as North America's leading supplier in of call center solutions, which are integrated with the Definity PBXs. The company now sells a multimedia contact center system that can interwork with several other major PBX and IVR systems. The modular architecture of Avaya's Interaction Center software provides for the management of voice calls, e-mail, Web-based interaction, and contact center agents, while providing computer telephony integration to the three most commonly used database systems.

Avaya supplied 25 ECLIPS servers to the month-long World Cup of football/soccer to connect 7,000 voice endpoints in Japan and South Korea. The IP WAN for this event successfully carried about 100,000 phone calls each day, in addition to conventional data traffic, thus proving the viability of the mass adoption of Internet telephony.