Avaya on Feb. 26 will bring the big business benefits of voice over IP to very small businesses when it releases a new version of its IP Office IP telephony offering.

Avaya in the launch of its latest IP Office offering took several steps to make IP telephony accessible and affordable for businesses with as few as four users, although the sweet spot for the new offering is 10 to 20 users, according to Joe Scotto, global director of product marketing for SMB solutions at Avaya in Basking Ridge, N.J.

Avaya in version 4.0 of its IP Office software made it possible for small businesses to use the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunking services from carriers or service providers such as Verizon for their outside phone lines, cutting calling plans in many cases by half.

“Service provider resellers can package in services. With Verizon, for example, the typical cost for a 24 channel T-1 [line] is $650 [per month]. This with a calling plan included is $350 [per month],” said Scotto.

At the same time, SMBs can use those cheaper IP-based lines without having to buy SIP-based IP phones, thanks to a SIP-gateway implementation in the new, modular IP Office 500 communications server.

The server supports analog, digital and SIP phones, providing users of those phones with voice messaging, telephony and a customer service suite of functions.

“This enables that small business expecting growth and needing more sophisticated capabilities to get in at a very affordable price and have a path going forward that enables them to add capacity, locations and intelligence as needed,” said Scotto.

That capability to easily upgrade as the business grows “is very important for small businesses,” said Maria Carolina Guedes Smith, senior consultant at AMI Partners in New York.

The new Avaya IP Office 4.0 release, in addition to SIP trunking, adds a multisite hot desk feature which allows users to move from one office to another and “log into a phone as if they were using their own office phone,” said Scotto. That capability works across analog, digital and IP phones.

Avaya in its IP Office Release 4.0 upgrade created two software options—Standard and Professional Editions.

Standard Edition supports up to 32 ports at a single site, provides a conferencing bridge for up to 64 parties and includes a new system status application that allows resellers to add on remote monitoring and support services.

License options with Standard Edition allow customers to add wireless mobility, the SIP Trunking, voicemail and the option to upgrade to Professional Edition.

The new system status application allows Avaya channel partners to remotely identify and resolve problems with a customer’s system. “If something’s happening with the system, the reseller gets an alert and they can resolve it remotely. They don’t have to send a technician onsite, and the customer gets the problem solved quicker,” said Scotto.

That capability is key for small businesses that rely on the systems for their day-to-day activities but don’t have an IT staff to maintain them, said Guedes Smith.

Professional Edition for its part can scale to support up to 270 ports, provides secure conferencing through personalized pins for each party and gives access to small community networking. License options for it include unified messaging, integrated voice response, a contract center application, audio conferencing control and storage for call search and replay.

To read more about Avaya’s VOIP offerings for midsize companies, click here.

For small businesses looking to add LAN capabilities, Avaya is teaming up with Extreme Networks to offer specially-priced packages that include Extreme Ethernet switches through their joint resellers.

The modular design of both the server and software allows resellers to customize their offerings for smaller businesses. “It also enables the channel to deliver a more holistic solution. They can wrap around services, data networking and applications for a particular industry,” said Scotto.

Avaya in addressing the needs of very small businesses is addressing a highly competitive space. IP Office competes with similar offerings from NEC, Toshiba and Panasonic as well as Nortel Networks and to a lesser extent Cisco Systems.

“There is a broad number of competitors including global and local players from voice and data backgrounds. They’re all developing specific strategies and products to reach this segment. They all have different approaches,” said Guedes Smith, adding that Avaya is unique in its understanding of the voice requirements of SMBs.

IP Office Standard Edition with the IP Office 500 communications server starts at $700 list, and a series of line cards supporting handsets and trunk lines starts at $250. The upgrade to Professional Edition lists for $1,000.

A typical configuration supporting 20 users with phones, voicemail, eight trunks and the Standard Edition software would list at $7200.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2094186,00.asp?kc=EWRSS04069TX1K0000701

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One of the reasons given for Michael Dell re-claiming the CEO mantle at Dell last week was the realization that customer service standards had slipped, and need to be restored.

In our ZDNet neighborhood, as well as in the blogosphere and among friends and neighbors, this perception has taken on a disturbingly common truism: bought a Dell, had a problem, called customer service, got someone in India, they weren’t especially helpful.

Oftentimes this lack of helpfulness is blamed on confusing directions, other times on language and diction issues.

While I am quite uncomfortable with attacking people for the way they speak, I do have to wonder why Dell has been tone-deaf to the criticisms about problem with their Tier I consumer-level tech support. Perhaps it is because it has been part of their corporate lore that the money saved by outsourcing this support overseas will successfully influence the bottom line and then the stock price.

But perhaps not. The decline in Dell’s stock price is a key reason cited for Michael Dell’s return. It is his name on the door, you know.

Michael’s off to a good start, cutting bonuses and trimming management layers. But he needs to do more.

So in light of these problems, I would suggest that Michael Dell and key staffers look at bringing consumer tech support back to the U.S.A. Such an evaluation should not be performed strictly as a cost-benefit analysis based on quantifiable expenditure factors, but with sensitivity for the sales lost as former customers bolt and tell their friends to, as well.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=1426

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As more carriers and cable companies dip their toes into the market for bandwidth-hungry IPTV and video-on-demand services, they will have to improve the weakest link in the service delivery chain: the core of the carrier’s network.

Juniper Networks and Intelliden have teamed up to help by bridging the gap between quality-of-service mechanisms and policies to allow service providers to dynamically allocate more bandwidth to those high-bandwidth applications as they traverse the core of the carrier network.

The two companies will jump out ahead of the demand curve on Jan. 24 by launching their combined Dynamic Networking Automation offering for bandwidth-hungry IP services.

The DNA offering was created by integrating Juniper’s SDX (Service Deployment System) platform for its carrier switches and Intelliden’s Dynamic Resource Provisioning software.

Together they deliver policy and real-time network resource management into the core of the network, now the weakest point in the carrier’s network, according to Rahul Sachdev, vice president of marketing at Intelliden, in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Until now a lot of those problems that have been addressed have been at the edge of the network—not the core. We are extending intelligence to the core to set quality of service, control bandwidth and so on,” he said.

Carriers to this point have thrown bandwidth at the core of the network to ensure enough resources during peak times. Those practices will no longer scale or be economical when carriers begin to offer more bandwidth-intensive services such as video on demand, IPTV and VOIP (voice over IP).

The integration work was driven by joint customer Telus, a small but innovative carrier in Western Canada. Telus was looking for a way to bridge the communications gap between those responsible for policy creation and those that handle day-to-day network operations, according to Brian Lakey, director of OSS architecture and strategy at Telus, in Edmonton, Alberta.

“The network provides quality-of-service metrics through [Multiprotocol Label Switching]. This is about merging the policy with those end-to-end controls and keeping them in sync. Policy is based on an accurate representation of QOS, and it can be dynamically reprovisioned to meet policy needs,” he said.

“The needs between different sites change,” Sachdev said. “You have to flex the network in real time to support different policies for different applications for different users. Today there is no integrated way to do that across the end-to-end network.”

As carriers move beyond smaller pilots for high-bandwidth services such as IPTV, the need for such flexibility will grow, believes Larry Goldman, co-founder of OSS Observer in Sugar Grove, Ill.

“This is ahead of the real demand, but it’s indicative of where things are going,” he said. “There are hundreds of service providers in the world all intending to offer video on-demand services. The usage of video on telco networks is still comparatively low, but it’s growing rapidly. The usage of the network will dramatically change because each individual service will be much more bandwidth-intensive and service providers are anticipating billions of subscribers.”

The joint DNA offering will use the APIs in Juniper’s SDX platform to allow dynamic resource awareness in the network and allow dynamic provisioning of network elements and paths based on real-time application requirements.

DNA is due early in the second half of the year.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2086931,00.asp?kc=EWRSS04069TX1K0000701

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