Tag Archive for: Avaya

PBX Market Share

Check out how the things have changed in the Enterprise PBX landscape over the past 10 years.    In 2006 Avaya plus Nortel had 38% of the entire market.   Avaya, 10 years later, and after purchasing Nortel’s Enterprise group, is down to 17%!

Who is moving up?   Microsoft was not even on the 2006 chart… it now has 6%

Cisco, 10 years ago was only 15% and is now 35%

PBX Market Share

Now, 10 years later:

PBX Market Share

But this doesn’t tell the whole story.   Companies are now moving to the Cloud and UCaaS.   Check out our next Blog Post.

Genesys to Buy Interactive Intelligence

$1.4 Billion Deal.

Amy Thomson /Melissa Mittelman

August 31, 2016

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc., the maker of call-center software, has agreed to buy Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. in a deal valued at about $1.4 billion.

Genesys will pay Interactive Intelligence holders $60.50 a share in cash, the companies said in a statement Wednesday. That represents a 36 percent premium to Interactive Intelligence’s price on July 28, before media reported that the company was exploring strategic alternatives, the companies said. It’s 6.8 percent above Tuesday’s closing price.

The deal will give Daly City, California-based Genesys access to Interactive Intelligence’s cloud-based software, which is designed to help call centers improve the customer experience. In recent years, the old 1-800 model has been giving way to services that don’t simply provide support but also follow people as they browse the web, arming companies with data they can use to sell more products and services.

“Customer engagement is the hot topic,” Terry Tillman, a Raymond James analyst in Atlanta, said in a telephone interview. “Whether it’s interacting with your customers in self-service mode on a website or social media, or with the traditional call into a contact center, engaging with your customers and delighting them is as important as ever.”

Tillman also said that Interactive Intelligence’s ongoing shift to a “pure cloud” play could have been difficult if it remained public. By selling itself to Genesys, which is private, the company can sidestep Wall Street skepticism.

Genesys, which received a $900 million investment last month from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, is looking to use the recent infusion to expand its business, people familiar with the matter said this month. The company also is considering acquiring Avaya Inc.’s call centers, one of the people said at the time.

The deal, which is expected to close by year-end, is being funded through a combination of cash and debt financing, provided by Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Royal Bank of Canada, the companies said in the statement. Those banks are also serving as financial advisers to Genesys. Union Square Advisors LLC advised Interactive Intelligence.

Session Manager Controls Calls

The Avaya Aura Session Manager is the core of Avaya’s SIP-based architecture, unifying all Avaya UC services. Aura Session Manager integrates with Avaya’s Aura Communication Manager, media gateways, messaging services, session border controller, conferencing, contact center and more, creating a centralized infrastructure that helps lower the total cost of ownership and administration costs.

Avaya’s Aura Session Manager has the unique ability to allow enterprise-wide dial plans across multiple vendor PBX environments. It can create system wide network routing rules to route calls in a cost-efficient manner using least-cost routing methods, alternative routing, time-of-day routing, toll avoidance and more.

Session Manager is truly an enterprise product, as it can support up to 250,000 SIP users, 350,000 SIP devices, 300,000 dial patterns, 1,000 SIP domains and many more. It supports connectivity to Cisco, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and other third-party PBXs, making it flexible and easy to integrate with existing infrastructure.

With a tolerance of up to 1,000-millisecond (ms) round-trip delay — from the source to the destination and back — it is suitable for almost any network environment, even satellite connections, which typically fluctuate between 600 to 900 ms round-trip delay.

Enterprise PBX Market Continues Slide Despite Improving Economic Conditions

Campbell, CALIFORNIA —Technology market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), reported in 2015 that the global enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) market closed down 4 percent in 2014, to $8.7 billion, as businesses continue to hold off new purchases and upgrades of PBX equipment despite improving worldwide economic conditions.  The trend appears to continue thru all of 2015 as well.

The overall market decline masks the health of the evolving UC applications segment, which jumped 20 percent in 2014, energized by the demand for tools to increase workforce productivity.

The data comes from Infonetics’ fourth quarter 2014 (4Q14) and year-end Enterprise Unified Communications Voice Equipment market share, size and forecast report, which tracks PBX phone systems, voice over IP gateways, UC applications and IP phones.

“The enterprise telephony market continues to be tough. Just as we see one area begin to improve, it’s offset by slowdowns in geographies or market segments. Underscoring the declines are not only slowing businesses purchases but also competitive pricing, which has created unpredictable swings,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS. “The move to the cloud is having an impact in certain markets, particularly North America.”
MORE ENTERPRISE TELEPHONY MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

  • Globally, PBX revenue, including TDM (time-division multiplexing) and IP PBXs, dropped 6 percent in 2014
  • Vendors remain in a battle to gain customers and hold onto existing ones as enterprises migrate to IP and UC solutions: In 2014, the top four PBX revenue market share leaders were, in alphabetical order, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and NEC
  • Microsoft continues to see strong sales on the UC front, solidifying its position atop the unified communications market share leaderboard

Avaya Messaging voicemail

Avaya’s Aura Messaging (AAM) server is another component of the Avaya UC platform. With Aura Messaging, companies can have fast and easy access to messages. Critical new messages can alert employees and help maintain high customer service standards in any type of business.

Aura Messaging is more than a simple messaging and voicemail server. It carries advanced functions, such as Speech Auto Attendant, which allows callers to say a name instead of entering an extension; Notify Me, which sends text messages and email notification while calling the user; Voice Recognition, which allows users to say names to address voicemail messages; and many more functions.

Some other neat features include Speech-to-Text, which converts voicemail to text and delivers it to a user’s email; Self-Administration so users can manage their options via a provided Web portal; Internet Message Access Protocol support, which allows companies to use their preferred email client; and Avaya one-X Speech, which gives users the power to manage their voice messages, email and calendar via verbal commands.

Aura Messaging can support up to 20,000 users and 300 ports, depending on the deployment configuration.

Presence Services for enhanced collaboration

Avaya’s Aura Presence Services is an Avaya UC server designed to help users collaborate more effectively by collecting and broadcasting presence information across all users connected to the Aura Platform. Using the presence information, users can see who is busy, away from their desk, on the phone, doesn’t want to be disturbed, or simply not available, therefore saving time.

Aura Presence Services are primarily used to power other Avaya presence and instant messaging clients, adding more value and functionality to them and delivering full UC services. Some application examples include Avaya Communicator (softphone); Avaya Aura Agent Desktop; Avaya one-X Communicator; Avaya one-X Attendant; and Avaya IP phones, such as the 96X0 Series and 96X1 Series.

Avaya Marks a Decade as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony

Old Phone 2Avaya, a global leader in business communications systems, soft-ware and services, today announced it has reached one full decade as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quad-rant for Corporate Telephony with the most recent report.

The 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony report notes that the “market is evolving from a focus on innovation in proprietary hardware to use of commodity hardware and standards-based software. While most telephony solutions shipping today are Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled or IP-PBX solutions, the associated endpoints are a mix of time division multiplexing (TDM) and IP.”

Avaya has fully embraced these trends by offering telephony as both a fully virtualized solution for customer-preferred servers and in an appliance model on commodity servers optimized for Avaya. In terms of end points, Avaya uniquely offers TDM and IP enabled end-points for H.323 and SIP as well as a comprehensive client for Windows, Android and iOS devices.

When it comes to purchasing new or upgrading systems, Gartner recommends that “decision criteria for corporate telephony platforms should focus on high-availability, scalable solutions, which support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), desktop and softphone functionality, and the ability to integrate with enterprise IT applications while delivering toll-grade voice quality.”

Avaya’s standards-based (SIP) telephony software delivers high quality voice capabilities that can be seamlessly extended to and accessed from desktop phones, softphones and mobile devices. Avaya Aura® Communication Manager, the company’s flagship telephony and unified communications technology for enterprises, supports some of the world’s largest contact centers, global businesses, and highly critical emergency communications operations.

With the acquisition of Esna earlier this year, Avaya now enables workers to access communications from inside browser-based applications such as Salesforce, Google for Work, Microsoft 365 and others, eliminating the need for them to move in and out of different applications and thus streamlining work streams and display screens. Avaya Engagement Development Platform enables developers to use a simple tool to tightly integrate communications into business processes and contextual data to further streamline workflows and increase productivity.

Quotes
“The expectation of simplicity, quality and speed of implementation for telephony is higher than any other technology. It’s been a driving factor in everything we do even as business communications technologies grew into multimedia applications over any device. We continue to set new benchmarks in developing and delivering the communications experience that engages the world’s businesses.”
Gary E. Barnett, SVP and GM, Avaya Engagement Solutions

“Communication Manager” provides UC foundation

The Avaya Aura Communication Manager is a core component of the Avaya UC platform and the foundation for delivering real-time voice, video, messaging, mobility and other UC services.Old Phone 2

The Communication Manager registers and maintains all Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints, call routing, call queuing, prioritization of voice and video calls and much more. The product also has built-in conferencing and contact center applications — suitable for companies with call centers and demanding conferencing needs.

The Communication Manager offers more than 700 features that are available to all users, no matter where they are working from, including office users and remote users working from home or on the road.

With this product, SIP and H.323 are fully supported, along with other industry-standard protocols. Connection with PSTN and ISDN services is possible using Avaya’s media gateways, such as the Avaya G250. These media gateways work pretty much the same way as most vendors’, connecting to the Aura Communication Manager and providing inbound and outbound call routing to PSTN and ISDN services.

Critical environments can also have a second Communication Manager installed, providing high-availability and uninterruptible service in case the primary server is down. Extending this redundancy model further, in the event that both servers are down, users will automatically register to the media gateway — if available — and have access to basic telephony services until the servers are restored.

The Communication Manager is offered as a standalone hardware application server or a virtualized application. It runs on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, offering increased reliability, speed and smaller hardware requirements, as opposed to other non-Linux-based systems.

The Communication Manager can support up to 36,000 endpoints and 24,000 SIP trunks, making it a scalable solution for small to larger enterprises.

Voice systems and telepresence are hurting, but vendors see growth in other areas

January 11, 2016 | By Chris Talbot

Voice and telepresence are both suffering as vendor revenue in those areas continues to decline, but other enterprise infrastructure areas are growing. New research from Synergy Research Group shows that wireless LAN infrastructure products are growing the fastest – something that comes as little surprise as more enterprises roll out Wi-Fi deployments with the latest 802.11 technologies.

The Synergy report shows that revenue for WLAN products grew by about five percent in the last four quarters, whereas Ethernet switches grew at four percent, data center servers were a little above two percent, unified communications applications grew about four percent, routers were barely above zero percent, voice was down two percent and telepresence was down almost five percent.

It’s good news and bad news for the vendors involved. Cisco leads six out of the seven market categories. The exception is data center servers, where Hewlett Packard Enterprise reigns. HPE came in second in the Ethernet switches, routers and WLAN categories (the last is thanks to its 2015 acquisition of Aruba Networks).

“Cisco remains in a league of its own, accounting for a third of the market and gaining market share in the only segment where it is not the current leader,” said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in a statement. “Across these hardware-oriented product areas HPE is the only broad-based challenger to Cisco’s dominance and it has been steadily increasing its share of the market. However, what we are now seeing is the strong growth of cloud, hosted and collaborative software solutions, which is introducing competition from non-traditional areas and causing market boundaries to blur.”

The other number two vendors include – Dell in data center servers, Avaya in voice systems, Microsoft in UC applications and Polycom in telepresence.

But there are some up-and-comers gaining market share in each category, including Microsoft in UC apps and voice systems, Arista Networks in Ethernet switching, Mitel in voice systems, HPE in WLAN, Huawei in telepresence, Lenovo in data center servers and Cisco in data center servers.

Whether this could mean significant changes in market share and dominant vendors in the seven categories over the next several years is anybody’s guess. It seems unlikely there will be a repeat of the huge shake-up in networking that happened in the late 1990s, but transitions could happen.

“Services” Project Management.

Can you take any project manager and plop them onto any program and have it succeed?   Can a project manager who is an expert at deploying Avaya IP Office deploy Microsoft Lync?   Can a project manager who deploys ATT cell towers lead a Manage Service outsource project?   In other words, is Project Management “one size fits all”?

At First American Business Solutions we specialize in delivering world class services.   We perform deployments, upgrades, surveys and day- to-day maintenance support.   All of which take project management skills.

We believe “Services” project management is different from “Product” project management and we have a specialized discipline around it.  Our methodology, developed around a services only business, is designed for delivering network solutions that add business value to our customers.  Services Program Management is the framework by which all our programs are planned, estimated, controlled, and tracked in a consistent manner.  The program is based on the successful integration of people, process and systems.

Product focused methodologies (used by manufactures of equipment for example) is focused on the order, management and installation of hardware (servers, switches, etc.) whereas the Services Program Methodology is focused on the solution delivery.

Professional Services is a people and relationship type of business.  In a product based business it is possible for the client to buy your product if they believe it is the best product on the market regardless of the support people associated with the delivery because the physical product quality is the driver of the purchase.   In the services world of companies like First ABS it is not possible to separate the product from the delivery because the “people” are the product.  Therefore, not only do we have to have the best product (i.e. people to deliver that solution) but we must develop a relationship with that client before we can earn their trust to purchase services from us.  We must understand the client’s business drivers and benefit triggers and develop a partnership type of relationship where we are perceived as part of their team.

Case in point:   Recently a potential customer we had never done business with before contacted us about purchasing a block of hours for Tier 3 emergency technical support.   We provided a bid with a reasonable price for 200 hours for 7×24 support.   About a week later, that customer called with an emergency about a key site that had a switch outage.  Without a PO and without any commitment we immediately assigned the outage to an engineer who resolved the issue remotely within an hour!  To say the customer was pleased was an understatement.   As a result of that effort and the trust that was built, we received a PO for the full order within two weeks and we believe this is a start to a long lasting customer relationship.   This is an example of the “art” of project management.

Conclusion:  Services project management recognizes that there is both an art and a science to Project Management.  The Science is the traditional “Initiate, Plan, Deploy and Close” tactical part of project management.  The Art is the “people” part of project management.  The Art focuses on the client:  understanding their business, their revenue drivers, and how our solution will help them to be more successful.   Being flexible to the client’s always changing needs and leveraging knowledge from prior programs is key to the success of First ABS’ project management.  With our approach we strive to understand the customers’ business drivers from a strategic perspective, cultivate that relationship and then drive it down to the individual project for that client.

Despite Improving Economic Conditions Enterprise PBX Market Continues Slide

Campbell, CA (March 10, 2015)—Technology market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), today reported that the global enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) market closed down 4 percent in 2014, to $8.7 billion, as businesses continue to hold off new purchases and upgrades of PBX equipment despite improving worldwide economic conditions.

Infonetics chart
The overall market decline masks the health of the evolving UC applications segment, which jumped 20 percent in 2014, energized by the demand for tools to increase workforce productivity.

The data comes from Infonetics’ fourth quarter 2014 (4Q14) and year-end Enterprise Unified Communications Voice Equipment market share, size and forecast report, which tracks PBX phone systems, voice over IP gateways, UC applications and IP phones.

“The enterprise telephony market continues to be tough. Just as we see one area begin to improve, it’s offset by slowdowns in geographies or market segments. Underscoring the declines are not only slowing businesses purchases but also competitive pricing, which has created unpredictable swings,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS. “The move to the cloud is having an impact in certain markets, particularly North America.”

MORE ENTERPRISE TELEPHONY MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

  • Globally, PBX revenue, including TDM (time-division multiplexing) and IP PBXs, dropped 6 percent in 2014 from 2013, and dipped 1 percent in 4Q14 from 4Q13
  • PBX line shipments declined 3 percent in 2014 from 2013; In 4Q14, line shipments were up 4 percent year-over-year, driven by pure IP PBX
  • Vendors remain in a battle to gain customers and hold onto existing ones as enterprises migrate to IP and UC solutions: In 2014, the top four PBX revenue market share leaders were, in alphabetical order, Avaya, Cisco, Miteland NEC

Microsoft continues to see strong sales on the UC front, solidifying its position atop the unified communications market share leaderboard