Avaya recently announced a breakthrough in communications-enabled applications development designed to drive the next wave of transformation in business collaboration. With the release of a new development platform, Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment, makes it easy to tailor collaboration applications to support virtually any role, any task or any vertical.
With the introduction of Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment, Avaya is dramatically simplifying how communications or collaboration is embedded into enterprise business applications. Until now, weaving in collaboration or communication capabilities into a medical patient monitoring application or a home insurance adjuster application often could take upwards of six months.

Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment changes all that. Now, that type of integration typically can be completed in days as opposed to weeks through the middleware-like functionality that Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment provides.

By abstracting the complexity of the communications and collaboration engines, Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment removes the needs for deep communications expertise these systems generally have required in the past.

For example, Paris Gallery, a retailer in the Middle East, is extending the “smart facilities management” capabilities deployed in its stores to include direct integration with existing Avaya collaboration capabilities, giving employees access to operations data and communications from anywhere in the store.

Using Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment, the developer created the application within two days, instead of the weeks it would have taken otherwise.

Highlights of the new development platform include:

* Applications deployed are automatically scalable, highly available and secure;
* Applications are cloud-ready – collaboration Environment is completely virtualised;
* A snap-in model that enables rapid, more cost-effective solution development and repeatability;
* A common set of methods are used for voice, video, e-mail and SMS; and
* A cloud-based development environment – Avaya Aura Collaboratory – that allows developers to build and test applications on a virtual instance of the Avaya Aura platform.

Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment is delivered on the Avaya Aura core unified communications platform. The latest release of Avaya Aura goes even further to simplify management, provide higher levels of security and lower total cost of ownership in a foundation that allows customers and partners the flexibility to grow and add value through innovative capabilities.

Recent advancements of the Avaya Aura core platform that offer centralised licensing and a virtualised, lighter footprint continue Avaya’s commitment to simplify implementation and improve operational costs for even the most complex environments.

“Companies have been actively interested in getting more value out of communication and collaboration investments, but until now were limited by the complexity and specialised skill set needed to combine them with other applications and processes,” says Gary E. Barnett, senior vice president and general manager, Collaboration, Avaya.

“We’ve just eliminated those challenges. I believe we’re on the threshold of a whole new age of creativity and innovation in collaboration as companies begin to understand what’s now possible with Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment.”