Avaya Proposes Services Extensions to SIP

Avaya intends to leverage the technology portfolio from recently acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions to create a new standard for business communications.

According to Avaya, this new standard will be based on open standards, communications-enabled business systems and effective, contextual, real-time communications enabled by a services-oriented architecture (SOA). Avaya is outlining a “roadmap” to this new standard centered around the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling/setup protocol, which allows multimedia communications to behave similarly to telephone calls. SIP allows users to have access to data based on the context of a specific task and employ real-time communications when they provide value to business processes.

Avaya Aura, a SIP-based communications platform that unifies complex communications networks, is a key component of the Avaya roadmap. Aura provides an upgrade path for existing Nortel voice and unified communications customers. The roadmap expands the value of Aura with the addition of Avaya (formerly Nortel) Agile Communications Environment (ACE), which uses SOA and other Web services to facilitate the rapid development of communications-enabled applications.

Aura is also at the center of Avaya's contact center portfolio. With this foundation, Avaya says contact centers will move to a SIP-based, service-oriented architecture, simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. The contact center solution will be based on a new and collaborative work assignment model that will connect customers, agents and information.

In addition, Avaya intends to integrate Nortel networking technologies into its offerings for small and medium enterprise communications and data products. Nortel’s capabilities will expand the functionality of Avaya’s solutions in these areas with features such as centrally managed, unified communications, “always-on” network reliability, and enhanced network efficiency and scalability.