Today more than nine out of ten enterprise employees worldwide work somewhere other than a headquarters facility, yet they typically have disparate communications systems with varying features and degrees of quality, which impacts employee productivity and customer service.
To help businesses deliver a consistent customer experience across hundreds of locations while increasing the speed and ease of deployment, Avaya, a provider of communications applications, systems and services, announced Avaya Distributed Office, a new IP telephony communications system that delivers rich branch communications capabilities and powerful management tools in an economical package.
"Avaya's branch solutions effectively meet a variety of business needs, from locations with basic, standalone communications requirements, through small and midsize business customers who need full and flexible configurations, to large enterprises who need the richest, most complete communications capabilities, including customer contact centres, distributed seamlessly across the entire enterprise," said Stuart Wells, senior vice president and president, Global Communications Solutions. "But today's increasingly distributed enterprises are driving new requirements. They need to efficiently manage hundreds and thousands of small locations worldwide, rapidly deploy solutions in a timely, resourceful and cost efficient manner, and provide branch employees with the communications tools and capabilities to provide exceptional customer service -- all with lowest total cost of ownership. Avaya Distributed Office is designed to meet all of these requirements."
"Most branch communications systems are designed for small businesses or large enterprises and then retrofitted to meet the needs of a branch," said Zeus Kerravala, vice president, Yankee Group. "Unfortunately, that doesn't always meet the needs of a distributed enterprise where the branch is key to a business's operations. With Avaya Distributed Office, it's the first time a vendor considered the particular challenges of a distributed enterprise and designed a system to meet its unique needs."
Avaya Distributed Office can be pre-configured at the factory based on a business's preferences, which significantly reduces on-site installation time and ensures consistent delivery of the same, high-quality communications capabilities across each branch office. The web-based pre-configuration tool uses standardised templates for functions such as coverage path for incoming calls, branch office employees' speed-dial numbers, or assigned number prefixes for inter-branch calling – all customised to suit the individual business location, which can significantly speed deployment. Centralised management tools give headquarters IT staff complete branch network visibility and control from a single interface, which reduces operating costs.
Avaya Distributed Office uses a SIP based architecture providing flexible scalability. Call processing and applications are distributed to the branch versus centralised in headquarters, increasing system reliability, reducing latency and improving WAN utilisation. Adding new locations is as simple as adding a new platform to the branch, with no additional requirements for servers at a central location. This distributed communication architecture, facilitates easy and cost effective scalability, while at the same time leveraging investments in central resources.
The new communications solution consists of new hardware and software from Avaya. The Avaya Distributed Office i40 and Avaya Distributed Office i120 support 40 and 120 users respectively, with flexible media and trunking configurations. The solution is complemented by Avaya's broad portfolio of phones and clients, including the new Avaya one-X Deskphone Value Edition family of cost-effective IP telephones that deliver high quality features at attractive price points for customers.
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