UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

People work together in different ways. And they use a lot of collaboration tools: IP telephony for voice calling, web, and video conferencing, voice mail, mobility, desktop sharing, instant messaging, and presence, and more.

Unified communications (UC) solutions deliver integration of these tools, with seamless user experiences that help people work together more effectively. Anywhere, on any device. They bring real-time communication from your phone system and conferencing solutions together with messaging and chat and integrate with everyday business applications using APIs.

UC solutions are available as on-premises software, partner-hosted solutions, or as a service (UCaaS) from cloud providers.

Innovative organizations are using unified communications and collaboration solutions to improve customer service, workforce productivity and business resilience. Here’s how IP-based solutions from Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft are changing how organizations can integrate technologies to respond to the changing needs of customers, employees and partners.

Amongst the leading Unified Communications solutions providers, our solutions offering encompass, IP telephony architectures with Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft as a base at a single location/geography to multiple locations and geographies
As a truly converged solution — or, more accurately, a set of solutions — unified communications and collaboration has become a common ground where vendors from various disciplines are coming together to build competitive products and suites based not only on the needs of their business customers, but also on their traditional strengths as solutions providers. It is also an area where vendor consolidation has taken place, with the acquisition of Nortel by Avaya in late 2009 and the acquisition of Tandberg by Cisco in early 2010. Because unified communications and collaboration covers a wide range of product solutions, applications and disciplines, most of the vendors have either acquired companies — as Avaya and Cisco have done — or partner with other vendors to offer a full range of solutions for customers. That’s why interoperability and support of open standards is so critical. Despite efforts to round out their product lines with a wide range of services, all of the vendors require some level of partnership and collaboration to deliver every aspect of an integrated unified communications and collaboration solution.

CISCO UNIFIED COMMUNICATION

Cisco Cisco offers perhaps the broadest product portfolio for unified communications and collaboration, with collaboration services available on premises to be deployed with existing infrastructure — where Cisco is an obvious market leader — but also on demand using software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions such as WebEx. Cisco’s video conferencing offerings were strengthened, particularly in delivering services for desktop and notebook computers, with the acquisition of Tandberg. The Tandberg technology has been added to Cisco’s TelePresence product line, offering a full range of videoconferencing solutions that are tied into the organization’s unified communications and collaboration strategy.

Cisco positions its collaboration solutions as open and interoperable, enabling customers to integrate new and existing collaboration technologies. It packages its collaboration solutions as conferencing, customer care, enterprise social software, IP communications, messaging, mobile applications, and TelePresence. A relative newcomer is Cisco Quad, which is positioned as an enterprise collaboration platform that combines social networking with communications, business information and content management systems. One of the major benefits of Cisco Quad is that it is designed to work with other collaboration platforms and document management systems already on the market. Cisco Quad integrates the creation of content, communications platforms, business transactional systems and social capabilities. It features real-time integration through an open architecture and includes video as an embedded form of communication. It also offers enhanced security and policy management.

The Cisco portfolio is packaged under the name Cisco Unified Communications. It is a scalable, distributed, highly available enterprise-class system that delivers voice, video, presence and mobility services, connecting as many as 30,000 or more users of IP phones, media processing devices, VoIP gateways, mobile devices and multimedia gateways. Another important and relatively new feature of Cisco Unified Communications is the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine. The solution is designed to link users at different companies — or users in autonomous groups within an organization — that do not have direct connectivity. It is designed to enable features such as business-to-business video and high-definition VoIP with multiple levels of security built in.

AVAYA Unified Communication

Avaya has been a leader in the telephony segment of the market with its Avaya Aura Communications Manager telephony server, its Modular Messaging product and the contact center capabilities in its Interaction center. With the acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions, Avaya has embarked on a new product roadmap for universal communications designed to assure customers that it will protect, extend and grow their investments. The key is an enterprisewide, real-time architecture built around open standards such as SIP, presence and web services.

Avaya Aura is the company’s core communications platform, supporting unified communications and collaboration with contact center solutions for midsize and large enterprises. Avaya Aura provides the integration and management platform between the company’s PBXs and the unified communications and collaboration services it supports, such as voice, video, messaging, conferencing and mobility. Aura enables legacy Avaya and Nortel PBXs to interoperate with SIP-based VoIP equipment, which promises to reduce the cost of adopting unified communications and collaboration solutions because it obviates the need to replace existing PBXs and phones.

Among the benefits delivered by Avaya in its unified communications and collaboration strategy and Aura product line are adherence to industry standards, an open platform, multi-vendor compatibility and robust, high-availability features. Avaya Aura includes five core applications
Communications Manager: This is Avaya’s leading telephony solution, delivering voice and video control for a resilient, distributed network of media gateways and a wide range of analog, digital and IP-based communication devices. It scales from fewer than 100 users to as many as 36,000 users on a single system and more than a million users on a single network.
Session Manager: The SIP Session Manager makes it possible to use Avaya Aura to integrate and simplify existing infrastructure, combining existing PBXs and other communications systems regardless of vendor. Among other features, Session Manager enables users to log in from remote locations and get access to a full set of pre-programmed capabilities.
Applications Enablement Services: These are enhanced telephony APIs, protocols and web services that support off the-shelf and custom integration with hundreds of communications and business applications.
Presence Services: These integrate rich presence capabilities across diverse environments, including Avaya and third-party products. Presence services support voice calls and instant messaging, enabling users throughout the network to reach the people they need using multiple communications channels.
Systems Manager: This is a common management framework that optimizes central management functions for provisioning, operations and fault/performance monitoring.

Helping to Accelerate Digital Transformation
Your business wants to make every experience as seamless and connected as possible. So employee collaboration is easier and more efficient, and customer satisfaction is higher. Avaya solutions make it happen.

Avaya IP Office
IP Office is a single, stackable, scalable small business communications system that grows with your business easily and cost-effectively. Built from the ground up specifically for small and midsize businesses, IP Office offers technical flexibility – it uses digital, analog, IP, or any combination of these – and resiliency.

Key Capabilities at a Glance
• Flexible Deployment: In the cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployments are all supported with IP Office along with the ability to migrate from one to the other when the time is right for you.
• All-in-one Communications and Collaboration: The Avaya Equinox experience provides a single app for voice, video, messaging, conferencing and calendar and keeps employees productive on any device, from any location.
• Cost-saving applications: built-in audio and video conferencing, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and voice and instant messaging streamline support and reduce monthly costs.
• Complete mobility solutions: Whether your employees are on the road, working remotely, or just at a different location, IP Office’s intuitive tools and apps keep them engaged, productive and reachable.
• Out-of-the-box applications integration: Embed communications in the applications you already have: Salesforce, Google, Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for Business.
• Distinctive Customer Contact: IP Office offers integrated voice, webchat, email, FAX and reporting capabilities that allow even the smallest contact center to support sophisticated and satisfying customer interactions.
• Peace of Mind: Highly reliable and secure, IP Office reduces security threats, toll fraud, and downtime through a hardened architecture that has been proven in more than 635,000 businesses.
• Scalability (5 to 3,000 Users): Avaya IP Office grows with you as your business accelerates. Support up to 3,000 users at up to 150 networked sites. With Avaya IP Office, your small to midsized business has affordable, flexible and powerful choices for business communications. Select the features that are right for you today and add new capabilities as your business grows and faces new challenges. Regardless of the IP Office Edition you choose, you’ll be backed by Avaya and its 100+ year technology heritage of delivering communications solutions that matter to small and midsized businesses.

Connection of BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform with Avaya IP Office.

BT Trading Turret with Avaya
BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform can be integrated with Avaya IP Office. The BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform is a SIP endpoint management solution that interoperates with Avaya IP Office as SIP endpoints.
BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform manages BT Turrets by registering with Avaya and allowing communication with Avaya endpoints. BT Turret is a specialized telephony key system that is generally used by financial traders.

Reference Configuration
The below Figure illustrates a configuration that consists of Avaya IP Office 11 and BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform. BT Unified Trading IP Trade Platform interoperates with Avaya IP Office using a TCP connection.

MICROSOFT TEAMS
Microsoft’s take on collaboration, group messaging and video continues to evolve. Here’s how Microsoft Teams fits into the booming collaboration software market and what you need to know to evaluate it against rivals like Slack, Zoom and others
Microsoft Teams is a collaborative workspace within Microsoft 365/Office 365 that acts as a central hub for workplace conversations, collaborative teamwork, video chats and document sharing, all designed to aid worker productivity in a unified suite of tools.

Launched in 2017 as a rival to collaboration pioneer Slack, Microsoft saw use of Teams rocket to 75 million daily active users as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, according to stats released by Microsoft in April. The company called Teams the fastest growing business app in its history.

Since launch — and spurred on by the push for work-from-home connectivity — Teams has moved further into the spotlight as a key part of Microsoft’s workplace productivity and collaboration strategy.

“Teams has emerged as a star product rather than an add-on that is bundled within a larger productivity suite,.
Teams can serve as an alternative to — or even replace — email communications entirely, but it also acts more broadly to connect workers and their apps, particularly for remote workers. Think of it as a “digital translation of an open office space,” as a Microsoft spokesperson put it.

The collaborative workspace serves as the connective tissue that joins Microsoft 365 apps filling a “critical void” for Microsoft. “Microsoft saw early on that an integrated hub bringing together persistent chat, files and videoconferencing was going to be the future of enterprise collaboration,

Teams is available as a desktop app, via web browser, and as a mobile app. It’s supported across all major operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

Microsoft has been aggressive in the unified communications and collaboration space through a series of strategic partnerships with vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Aspect, and with significant new solutions that tie in unified communications and collaborations features and functions with Microsoft’s widely used applications such as Outlook, Office and SharePoint. One of the linchpins of the Microsoft strategy is its Microsoft Lync Server 2010 release, which is the next generation of its Office Communications Server product line.
Lync Server 2010 is positioned as delivering complete presence, instant messaging, conferencing and enterprise voice capabilities through a single interface that is consistent across all PC, browser and mobile devices. From an IT administrator standpoint, there is a single management infrastructure as well as enhanced capabilities to increase availability and interoperability with existing systems. Among the key features of Lync Server 2010 are:
Instant Messaging and Presence: Features include real-time presence information and enhanced instant messaging. Presence status can be set manually by a user or automatically. Contact cards are streamlined, and contacts can be unified across Lync Server 2010, Exchange Server and SharePoint. Server-to-server federation capabilities allow users to utilize presence and IM with other Office Communications Server/Lync Server users outside the corporate network. There is a public IM connectivity capability as well, providing instant access to users on popular IM platforms such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

Audio, Video and Web Conferencing: Microsoft Lync conferencing provides a rich user experience and unified interface. Features support HD video, one-click desktop sharing and the ability to start a conference on a mobile phone and continue it on a PC. Lync Server 2010 conferencing is designed to work with existing network, enterprise messaging and telephony infrastructure.
Enterprise Voice: Lync Server 2010 combines the telephony features of an IP PBX with presence, instant messaging and conferencing. It has traditional voice and calling features and is designed to enhance or even replace an existing IP PBX system.
Integration: One of the key features of Lync Server 2010 is that it is tightly coupled with other popular Microsoft platforms and applications, including Exchange, SharePoint, Office, Microsoft System Center and Active Directory. By linking closely with Exchange Server, for example, users can take advantage of a unified contact list, a shared calendar and integrated presence data across the enterprise.