HP and Avaya Partner, Triangulate Cisco?

Avaya and Cisco are archrivals for enterprise including contact center voice/data communications systems. Cisco (News - Alert) and HP, reported Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch in March are battling out for supplying gear to the hot cloud-based data center market.

 

Now HP is partnering with Avaya (News - Alert). Enemy of my enemy is my friend?

 

Or could it be that Avaya's owners have finally found a company that they could wed off to in a successful merger of complementary firms down the road that would enable them to finally cash out?

 

Before the marriage there is the dating and the activities together. HP and Avaya are doing just that by announcing what they say is "the delivery of flexible, cost-effective solutions that enable clients to extend advanced business communications into their networks and systems."

 

As part of a three-year strategic agreement, the companies are adding elements of Avaya's Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) and contact center products to the HP Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services portfolio for enterprises. This solution set is to be sold and delivered by HP.

 

With HP and Avaya UC Solutions, say the firms, their clients experience a full life cycle of services and support that spans planning, design, implementation, ongoing management and training. HP is offering Avaya Aura UC architecture and applications, Avaya Contact Center applications and Avaya's range of end-user client applications and endpoints as part of HP UC&C Lifecycle Services. Also organizations with multivendor environments can outsource the ongoing operations of their UC applications and infrastructure with the HP Managed Service offering for Avaya Aura. Clients in the healthcare, life sciences and financial services industries will also have access to vertical solutions "designed specifically to address their unique business requirements."  

 

HP Networking and Avaya have tested and certified products and solutions targeted to address the needs of enterprise, midsize and small businesses. These offerings, built on HP's UC&C consulting services, take a comprehensive approach to enterprise communications from strategy and planning through implementation, design and education.  HP helps clients develop a business case, long-term vision and current gap analysis based on their unique requirements. Clients have a complete life cycle of services to ensure their technology is mapped to deliver organizational value.

 

Avaya Aura is certified for interoperability with HP Networking products as part of the HP AllianceONE Program. HP also is a Platinum- or Gold-certified Avaya Connect channel partner in countries worldwide as well as a Platinum member of the Avaya DevConnect (News - Alert) developer program.

 

"Organizations face constant change and the decisions they make must be flexible enough to meet future needs -- such as unification of real-time communication with Web 2.0 and social media applications," said Gary M. Budzinski, senior vice president and general manager, Technology Services, HP. "With HP and Avaya, clients can increase the agility of their existing communication architectures and realize the aspiration of unified communications for multivendor interoperability and ultimately save organizational costs."

 

"HP and Avaya have highly complementary portfolios that deliver extraordinary benefits to customers, especially when combined with HP's consulting and IT outsourcing expertise," said Joel Hackney (News - Alert), senior vice president, Global Sales and Marketing, and president, Field Operations and Avaya Government Solutions, Avaya. "The HP and Avaya relationship enables customers to take out costs and transform their business via the strategic application of communications tools and services in the procurement and management model that best suits a company's objectives."

 

One major outfit, whose logo appears on HP's and Avaya's power-fed hardware, and that of their rivals, has blessed the partnership.

 

'Underwriters Laboratories was able to protect our existing multivendor investments and enable greater interoperability between business and desktop applications," said Christian Anschuetz, chief information officer of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a global independent product safety testing and certification organization. "With HP and Avaya, our organization is making greater use of technologies we have today and increasing the productivity of our workforce through richer, easier-to-use collaboration capabilities."