Avaya to Accelerate Collaborative Cloud with New Turnkey Solutions Featuring EMC, VMware Technologies

Earlier this week at VMware's annual event, VMworld, Avaya unveiled its new portfolio of turnkey virtualization-based solutions code-named Avaya Collaboration Pods to help customers accelerate deployments of Avaya Collaborative Cloud solutions. These solutions will go GA at the end of CY2012. The solutions feature storage arrays from EMC, VMware vCenter and VMware View datacenter virtualization and VDI products, respectively, and networking, management, communications applications and integration from Avaya.

Initially two Collaboration Pods will be available; one for Avaya Aura and another focused on VDI giving customers the option of choice depending on their specific needs.

Collaboration Pod for Aura is based on the Aura application framework. It gives customers the ability to deploy UCC apps in a fully virtualized environment, offering them the necessary building blocks for their own cloud infrastructure whether public or private. The management solution clearly integrates switching, servers, virtual machines (VMs), storage and VM mobility – dramatically simplifying the operational complexity that customers are facing today having to use different independent management platforms.

In addition to common elements included in both pods, the Aura pod contains the Avaya media gateway and an enterprise session border controller (SBC) that customers can optionally choose to add depending on the specific needs that they might have.

Collaboration Pod for VDI is focused on VDI technology by VMware (VMware View) and also includes the Collaboration Pod common elements set out below.

Common pod elements include:

• Avaya Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 7000 deployed as a distributed top-of-rack (ToR) Ethernet switching fabric supporting network-wide virtualized services with a single control plane independent of the physical topology
• VMware-based virtualization
• EMC Storage, and
• White labeled servers for compute

What This Means to You

To Customers: The message here is that data networking infrastructure needs to support acceleration of realtime application management and deployment. In this regard the key differentiator of the Aura Collaboration Pod is composed of: (1) The fully integrated management capability across the entire stack from the network layer through the application layer giving customers the ability to monitor and manage the pod as a single entity which translates into improved mean time to repair and greater up time – a must for business-critical apps; and (2) The availability of orchestration tools to automatically provision the network as events occur within vCenter.

The Collaboration Pods are solutions focused on enterprises and hosting providers that have limited staff expertise in-house regarding storage, VMs, servers, sizing and so on to deploy a next generation datacenter builds or a virtualized realtime UCC application or VDI environment. This is a turnkey solution offering fast time to market and revenue. From a verticals point of view education, healthcare and local and state government (historically strong verticals for networking) will see a benefit. Smaller cloud providers that want to streamline delivery of high-value Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Communications as a Service (CaaS) will similarly benefit. But again it goes back to where they are in terms of virtualizing their environment. For customers in the early planning stage this is a competitive solution to consider.

Other elements in the Collaboration Pod value proposition are:

• Business Continuity
  • Augments reliability through built in resiliency and business continuity inherent to VMware
  • Auto-Cloning
  • VM mobility across servers, racks or data centers using Collaboration Pods
  • Elimination of maintenance windows, move UC apps while in service
• Integrated Support
  • Avaya to provide integrated technical support for all components in the pod
• Ability to grow and expand
  • Unique High Speed interconnect on Avaya distributed ToR switches eliminates creation of Data Center islands and enables pods to grow seamlessly
• Openness and ease of integration
  • Avaya Aura is a SIP-based platform; Avaya Fabric Connect based on IEEE standards and interoperable with existing Ethernet networks

This is a good-looking turnkey solution. However, there are many competitors in this space known for virtualized solutions. For example, Cisco offers significant portions of its software on VMware, which can operate under the Cisco UCS servers and other qualified servers. Cisco also offers several virtual desktop integration (VDI; client virtualization) options. Others vendors mentioned by Gartner in its UC Magic Quadrant (August 27, 2012) with virtualized solution attributes are Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel, NEC, Siemens Enterprise Communications and Toshiba. Avaya, though listed in the leaders quadrant, is conspicuously lacking mention as regards virtualization.

The best recommendation to customers is to do their due diligence when shopping here in terms of risk-adjusted benefits and TCO. These benefit/cost assessments of alternative systems need to consider the solution’s impact on productivity improvement, CapEx and OpEx, business continuity, data security, etc. Risk considerations need to cover such items as: the impact of the new system on competitive differentiation; ability to scale to meet demand; and alignment of future business requirements with currently offered feature/functionality and the solution’s technology roadmap and, of course, interoperability.

To Partners: Avaya will be going into controlled introduction towards the end of CY2012. This will be limited to selected partners who will be chosen in the various theaters. Avaya will work closely with them through the controlled introduction. When the product goes GA, partners with the appropriate Aura certifications will be eligible to resell the products.

In geographies where Avaya Collaboration Pods have been sold to regional hosting providers, eligible partners will be included in Cloud Broker program. Partners will have the option of selling UC service from hosting provider based on an OpEx model instead of selling a premise-based offering. They will receive a pre-negotiated payment from hosting provider for seats sold. The partner will also sell end devices such as handsets, switches, etc. to customer. Avaya will be working on some of the licensing issues with partners to ensure that the Collaboration Pod is competitive. The intent is to allow partners to leverage Collaboration Pod offering in terms of sale of their own services and solutions.