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Catching up with many of the other unified communications vendors,  today announced that its Aura platform now can be virtualized.

Avaya has  to ensure that Aura – the company’s UC platform for managing voice, video and other call and contact center  – can run on virtualized equipment, creating potential cost savings for customers by more efficiently using their hardware, while allowing for easier management of the communication systems.

Customers can choose to run all or some of the UC applications on the new virtualized platform. A business could, for example, roll out a communications manager and session manager on virtualized equipment, but not the entire system manager. This “mix and match” functionality is a differentiator between Avaya and competitors, Barnett says.

WHAT AVAYA NEEDS TO DO: 

Virtualization of communication services is the “next big wave” in virtualization, because of the efficiencies virtualized equipment provides users, Barnett says. Having integration with VMware also allows the Aura platform to take advantage of VMware tools, such as vMotion, he says. In this scenario, a UC manager would be able to install updates, fix a broken VM in the stack or provide maintenance to the system without bringing it offline by simply migrating applications from running on one VM to another. Avaya’s goal, he says, is to provide a zero downtime environment.

Enterprises seem open to the idea of virtualizing their UC platforms, says Lazar, the Nemertes analyst. Concerns around performance lag when running virtualized environments are beginning to fade. If systems are architected to the specifications the vendors provide, latency should not be an issue, he says, even in a virtualized environment. Large enterprises and service providers, he believes would have the most use for this technology. A virtualized Aura platform could make it easier for Avaya channel partners to create cloud and managed hosted versions of UC platforms for customers, he notes.

By , Network World