Thursday, June 02, 2005

Meetings with Avaya

I had a great meeting with Avaya discussing their VOIP telephony solutions. We are currently using NEC as our telephony vendor, but want to keep our options open for what we are doing for the future as we expand as well as we continue to have more and more mobile staff.

They really seem to on the cutting edge of telephony along with Cisco. Some of the cool stuff that we discussed was we could plop in one of their gateway appliances that could service a satellite location and be a full PBX and provide all kinds of added functionality to those users that we do no have today. Integration with Outlook, and the ability to make calls directly from outlook or the web was one of them. You can just right click on a number and click call and it would dial out your desk phone. You of course can also use their soft phone application and make calls directly from your laptop without a desk phone at all. You can control settings like call forwarding, voicemail, etc all from your desktop without having to touch the phone itself.

One of the other cool things that we discussed is the use of our wireless infrastructure to have cell phones use the corporate wireless if they are in the building without having to use minutes on their cell phones. And when they are out of range of our wireless network, it would just work like a regular cell phone. We have looked at this before but the technology has always been proprietary and we would have had to buy all new wireless to make it happen. We would not have to with their solution.

All in all it was a very exciting meeting to see some of the possibilities of where the future might take us.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They have great stuff. I wish I had that problem.

Anonymous said...

While I have not used the Avaya products, I applaud you for looking into VoIP and unified messaging. We set up a system by Mitel a year and a half ago. Being a VoIP solution, it saves us tens of thousands of dollars when we build new buildings, since we did not have to install phone lines and traditional phone switches in the new buildings. The unified messaging is great as well. If you are "unifying" with an Exhange server, be sure to look at the storage capacity of that server. The soft phones are great for traveling and working away from the office. Have fun and good luck.

Terry Chapman said...

Thanks Scott. We actually have been using unified messaging with NEC for about 5 years now and love it. The cost saving are enormous. We have just have not been happen with the level of service with our current vendor hence the meeting with Avaya. Thanks for the comments.