Avaya (News - Alert) has been at the forefront in developing cross-platform collaboration tools for the past several years. However, this is not the only area that Avaya intends to disrupt. The vendor has released Aura Virtualized Environment (VE), which will convert its applications to run in virtualized environments.
The Aura unified communications suite version 6.2, together with six of its applications, has been certified to run under VMWare. Available as a free software download wherein organizations pay for user licenses, the software will allow organizations to run it on their own servers as part of a Collaboration Pod with virtualized storage and networking.
Virtualized applications like VMWare ThinApp are packaged into single executables and run completely isolated on the operating system and from each other ensuring no conflicts on end-point devices. This allows legacy applications to be packaged into a single executable that can be deployed on many operating system environments. Application virtualization encapsulates the application into a single EXE or MSI (News - Alert) executable which includes its settings, registry keys, DLLs, third-party libraries and frameworks making it possible to deploy it in a virtual system environment. This approach eliminates the need for installation agents on end-point devices and any application-to-application or application-to-operating system conflicts.
Avaya’s Aura UC suite will not only allow existing customers to migrate to the latest Avaya Aura, but also provide an opportunity for new customers who still have VMWare and not looking to take up a full UC-capable solution that would require them to buy more hardware. The suite also allows Avaya system integrators to design tailor-made solutions for organizations while partners will now be able to sell Aura feature sets such as mobility.
While it may seem like Avaya is late in virtualizing Aura, the truth is, many Avaya customers are still running on older platforms. In addition, virtual call centers are considered to be a new approach. The Aura VE can help organizations save money by testing it on spare servers before going live. In addition, it makes for a resilient disaster recovery UC system.
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Edited by Rich Steeves