Transcript for Avaya Evolutions – New Video Announcements
Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant. I’m in San Mateo at the Avaya Evolutions event. With me is Amir Hameed, and Amir is Senior Director, Technical Sales, for Avaya Americas. Hello.
Amir Hameed: Hi Blair, how are you?
Blair: Good. There were some announcements that you guys made today. What can you tell us about these new announcements?
Amir: Well, lots of exciting announcements surrounding the mobile enterprise, and a lot to do with video. As you saw us demonstrate today, we’ve announced our Flare Experience with Video into Aura. We had the clients that were extended out to various devices for mobility, obviously a Mac, a PC, the iPad, iOS devices; originally we only had voice, but now we’ve integrated video into that experience as well.
Blair: And that’s just through software?
Amir: That’s through software and licensing, correct.
Blair: Because part of what you were talking about today was the movement away from hardware and towards software.
Amir: Much more movement towards software, absolutely.
Blair: Okay, and what were some of the other announcements?
Amir: Well, we also had some exciting announcements around our Scopia, or Radvision line, where we now have our Scopia XT systems, which integrate into our IP Office. So for our mid-market customers, we know they’re very, very important to us, and they also crave enterprise-grade video collaboration. So for those customers we now integrate with our XT 5000 over SIP, and they can have either an embedded 4-port MCU or a 9-port MCU, giving them all of the collaboration that they could need. We call it “No Drama,” because of course you can simply send a single email out to the participants, and they can be within the company, or they can be outside, whether they’re suppliers or partners, and with a single click on the device of their choice they can actually join this conference. And that’s very noteworthy.
Today we also announced the Scopia client for Android. We of course have clients for the iPad, for the iPhone; works on a Macintosh, works on a PC, and it also integrates with existing video conferencing platforms that our customers may have. So if they have a telepresence room, we can tie it all together. If they happen to have a LifeSize, or a Polycom room, we can tie it all together. Like yourself, I’m also traveling all the time. And often I’ll be in an airport, and I’ll literally click “No Drama Video,” I’ll link into the Scopia from my iPhone, and I’ll be zoomed in and connected with people across Avaya or with our customers and effectively collaborating.
Blair: So there was a demo that worked very well today that showed how people on all the different devices and types of networks were able to link in and communicate. Can you talk a little about what you showed today?
Amir: Yeah, it was pretty exciting. We talk about the open collaboration. And as you know with Avaya Aura we’ve been committed to open standards and integrating into various environments. We also do that with our Scopia bridges. So with our Radvision Scopia bridge, which we demonstrated today, we sent out an email, and one individual happened to be on their Microsoft Lync client, and we embedded the Aura voice and video, so they were participating in this video conference. We had one person in Denver on a Polycom Boardroom station; they also linked in. We had somebody on a Cisco; they were able to link in. Others were on iPads or Macbooks. And then the fun part – we even had somebody in the crowd who dialed in; I think they were on their Android device and they were also able to link in, showing they inherent firewall traversal. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re “intra” domain, or “outside,” you have the ability to collaborate effectively across the board.
Blair: Great – well thank you very much, Amir.
Amir: A pleasure.