The new release of IP Office also makes some architectural and administrative changes designed to make things easier for Avaya channel partners who sell the product.
Miles Davis, Americas international midmarket sales leader at Avaya
Avaya has announced the availability of Avaya IP Office release 10, the latest version of its unified communications solution for SMBs and the mid-market. Key enhancements to the product include cloud-focused security improvements and user experience improvements designed to make the use of other applications more seamless. The new release also makes some changes from a partner’s perspective, including improving ease of installation and management, and simplifying licensing.
“Avaya IP Office, a mature product now in its 14th year, brings a significant amount that is new for both end users and partners,” said Miles Davis, Americas international midmarket sales leader at Avaya. He indicated the changes fall into three main buckets.
The first is security and resiliency enhancements driven by migration of the market to the cloud, which creates new security risks.
“We’ve seen a massive increase in the number of cyberattacks specifically on mid-size companies,” Davis said. “As a result, we have built encryption into both the media and the signalling, so that these are now available out of the box. This was available before, but as something that used to have to be manually configured. This is available in all of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid scenarios, with the latter in particular we are seeing a lot of at the moment.”
System resilience has also been enhanced to ensure users maintain connectivity throughout power outages. It provides system failover cloud to cloud, cloud to premises, premises to cloud and premises to premises.
User experience has been improved in several respects.”
“First, we have introduced support for a wider selection of desktop devices,” Davis said. “We haven’t walked away from that business.” On the higher end, this includes support for the Vantage device and the H175 video phone with its 7” hi-def touchscreen display. On the lower end, it includes support for the J129, a cost-effective IP phone for retail spaces and lobbies.
“The real significant end user experiences though, are in some of the APIs we have opened up,” Davis added. “The technology from our ESNA acquisition of last year has been baked into release 10. They allow the integration of other applications like Salesforce and LinkedIn, without having to use another application. We feel that will make a more seamless end user experience.” Virtual meeting functions have also been streamlined and strengthened with WebRTC audio and richer collaboration capabilities.
“For partners, we have added some architectural changes we think they will appreciate,” Davis indicated. “Channel partners are looking for the reliability of a mature product, but also for ease of deployment and ease of management. With release 10, IP Office is much simpler and more reliable to install. Then once it is in, it is easier to make changes than before. The diagnostics are much more intuitive.”
Licensing and other back-end management have been consolidated, to make partners’ lives easier.
“Licensing is now done through the same interface as our enterprise product,” Davis said. “With this release, we now have the same provisioning tool for our enterprise and mid-market products, and the same for premise-based as for cloud. Everything is all being consolidated under one single umbrella.”
Avaya IP Office release 10 is available now.
