The Avaya Collaborative Cloud

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1 The Avaya Collaborative Cloud Combining Collaboration and Networking Services to Effectively Build, Deliver, Use, and Enhance Communications in the Cloud Table of Contents Executive Summary... 1 The Emergence of Cloud Communications... 2 Migrating to the Cloud An Evolution or a Revolution?... 4 Cloud Development and Deployment Challenges... 5 Avaya The Leader in Collaborative Communications... 5 The Avaya Collaborative Cloud... 6 Avaya Collaborative Cloud Customer and Partner Focus Areas... 7 Avaya Managed Services... 8 Summary... 9 Executive Summary We are entering a new wave of cloud computing. The first wave was focused on meeting the organizations corporate computing requirements. The enterprise is now being rebuilt around people facilitating and leveraging their conversations and relationships, not just improving their ability to complete necessary business transactions. End users have now grown accustomed to the easier access and improved functionality cloud computing has brought to their enterprise applications. They are now expecting that same elegant user experience for their cloud communications solutions as well. Avaya has now extended its expertise in the cloud by delivering nextgeneration communications solutions, driven by the need to collaborate more effectively with co-workers, partners, and customers. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud framework enables organizations and partners to build, deliver, use, and enhance their cloud offerings to transform the way people work together. Avaya Collaborative Cloud is delivered over a single, open, scalable communications architecture from Avaya and its partners. With a network infrastructure extending across the entire enterprise, the Avaya solution leverages the rich and compelling suite of Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center (CC) solutions from the world s proven communication leader. Organizations large and small will benefit through better business results with the added ease of a consumer-like experience for end users. This white paper will provide the reader with a quick overview of the forces that are driving the adoption of cloud communication solutions. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud will then be introduced, with a description of its technology strengths and four customer/partner focus areas. The paper will conclude with a brief look at managed services of Avaya and delivery options. avaya.com 1

2 The Emergence of Cloud Communications Cloud computing offers many significant benefits to today s organizations, including substantial cost savings, IT simplicity, and increased operational flexibility. It can enable organizations to launch new services and applications quickly and inexpensively, providing an alternative for the need to purchase and maintain traditional customer on-premises equipment. The hosted cloud model can also reduce the need to hire, train, and retrain dedicated IT personnel needed to support on-premise solutions. Also, since cloud applications and services only require limited upfront investments (e.g., telsets or gateways), they can be booked as an ongoing monthly expense. This enables organizations to shift from a CapEx to an OpEx financial model, providing the flexibility and agility needed to scale up and down quickly based on market changes or fluctuations in user demand. All of these benefits have driven the rapid adoption of cloud computing across today s enterprises. Over the last ten years, the industry has witnessed several waves of cloud computing, and each wave is bigger and better than the one before. A new breed of cloud service providers (along with traditional service providers) is now at the forefront of this next wave of cloud computing, one that is more consumer-oriented, driven by users need to collaborate and communicate more effectively. So what market forces led to this next wave of cloud communications? The Move to Ubiquitous Access One of the key differences between early cloud implementations and the new wave of cloud communication is that end user choices and expectations have expanded significantly. There has been an explosion of connectivity options over the last 15 years. It began with faster local loop access via DSL and FTTC/H, followed quickly by 3G and 4G networks. Today, nearly every public and private facility is outfitted with Wi-Fi, individuals are connected almost continuously. This vast broadband coverage has driven a completely new set of communications tools, content, and applications. Services once satisfactory for individual remote access, like SMS and , are now dominated by real-time voice and video, and web access for surfing, watching, and commerce. For avaya.com 2

3 businesses, access to their critical customer and organization applications are now all wireless and instantaneous. Increased Control over Cloud Applications What was once a well controlled environment, with IT distributing desk phones, pagers, mobiles, and PC/laptops, is now a cacophony of user-provided smartphones, laptops, and tablets. These same user-provided devices have brought along a raft of new applications, both personal entertainment and productivity-oriented, with increased expectations for rapid response, constant upgrades and improvement, and user-controlled availability and access. Consumers now expect much more control over the applications they access from the cloud. The earliest corporate clouds were very IT-centric. Any changes or modifications to the cloud experience were only possible, if at all, with the intervention of the company s IT team. Although these applications will continue to be managed and supported by the IT organization, many cloud applications now provide users with the ability to personalize their applications to improve the user experience. With this increased control and transparency, some cloud applications now actually feel like on-premise solutions. Advancements in Communications Standards Industry standards have also evolved significantly over the last year, especially with respect to communication protocols. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has become the de facto universal standard. Standards-based protocols can simplify integration with corporate applications, interworking across devices, and collaboration applications. Almost every business and end user is now using some form of cloud service. They are familiar with and have accepted the many benefits of the cloud, and are comfortable with the hosted model. This has lead to a greater adoption of cloud services at a macro level expanding beyond the initial scope of corporate cloud computing solutions, to an expanding portfolio of collaboration and communications services. The industry is now moving from a cloud environment focused primarily on cost reductions and simplicity for the organization to a next-generation model, which is all about the end user experience and the applications and services they expect to consume every day. avaya.com 3

4 Migrating to the Cloud An Evolution or a Revolution? When cloud computing initially burst onto the scene, many industry pundits had grand visions of everyone moving everything directly to the cloud, and not owning any more servers or data centers. Organizations quickly responded by moving a wide variety of services to the cloud including storage-as-a-service, desktop-as-a-service, and more. However, the pendulum of that early vision has swung back to create a much more balanced and mediated approach. Organizations are now building their own private clouds, as well as utilizing a hosted model for some applications in the public cloud. This creates a hybrid cloud model where resources are split between the organization and the service provider, optimized for each organization. This balanced approach definitely rings true for cloud communications as well. The cloud provides the ability to easily add services that the company s on-premise infrastructure does not have access to or are too costly to acquire as a capital asset. With this capability, cloud communications won t replace all of the organization s existing infrastructure, but can provide significant benefits to supplement the organization s existing customer premise equipment. Organizations are migrating to cloud communication solutions and services gradually, often starting with their outsourcing applications. There are several reasons for this gradual transition and balance of public and private clouds: 1. It can preserve investments in on-premise equipment that still have depreciation life left. 2. The ROI is often unproven for new applications. There may also be IT skepticism about quality of service (QoS) for some applications (e.g., realtime services, voice, VDI etc.). Before making significant investments to bring them in house, some organizations will choose to consume them from the cloud first to minimize risk. 3. Security concerns for sensitive data may be an issue for some organizations. Moving intellectual property to the cloud may feel like there is a loss of control, resulting in a balance of public and private cloud implementations, depending on the security needs of the organization and data. avaya.com 4

5 The Avaya Difference: Avaya understands all of these drivers and concerns and therefore supports all deployment models including private, public, and a blend of hybrid clouds. Avaya Difference: Avaya understands the OSS/ BSS challenges and has built integration capabilities into the Avaya Collaborative Cloud right from the beginning, rather than as an afterthought. The Avaya Difference: The strength of Avaya comes from its ability to provide both unified communications as well as contact center functionality from one platform. This common environment offers unlimited flexibility and the ability to easily s cale up or down both economically and technically optimizing the costs to operate and deliver services to multiple market segments. Cloud Development and Deployment Challenges Although many organizations and service providers have already invested significant amounts of time and money into their new cloud communication implementations, success has been elusive for a large proportion. After years of work, many have come to realize more effort is required than originally anticipated. Some of the challenges are discussed below. Time-Consuming and Complex Integration Processes One of the main challenges cloud service providers and organizations face is integrating new applications into their existing OSS (operations support systems) and BSS (business support systems). This is because over the last several years, many have developed their own custom OSS/BSS systems to address specific business needs. Integration with legacy systems can become a major pain point in terms of quickly being able to bring customers onboard quickly, provision, manage, and administer the applications in an end-to-end, high performance, and secure environment. The Lack of Scalability and Flexibility Another challenge in cloud service development is ensuring scalability and flexibility. Today s service providers are looking for an option that will enable them to optimize their costs to deliver a service. They need a single platform that can easily scale up or down for all customers regardless of size both financially and technically. Avaya The Leader in Collaborative Communications Avaya is a leading global provider of next-generation business solutions, providing unified communications, real-time video collaboration, contact center, networking, and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. Avaya s objective is to give people the best collaboration experience regardless of the device, location, or media they choose. Avaya believes innovations in technology can enable collaboration. As organizations move toward a more geographically dispersed, 24x7 workforce, they need tools that will enable users to quickly solve all of their business challenges. Seamless and effective collaboration platforms are essential to support this objective. avaya.com 5

6 The Avaya Difference: Avaya solutions are well trusted and proven in the industry, having earned the distinction as a Leader in the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. Avaya has now leveraged its wealth of communicationsfocused expertise to deliver a comprehensive, cloud-based UC strategy to both organizations and service providers. Avaya is not new to the cloud. Several Avaya applications, including AvayaLive Engage and the Avaya Notification Solution (ANS), are offered from the cloud today. Avaya is now extending the benefits of the cloud to lead the market in delivering next-generation cloud solutions that are driven by the need to collaborate and communicate more effectively with co-workers, partners, and customers for better business results with the ease of a consumer-like experience. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud Avaya is extending the benefits of the cloud to lead the market in delivering next generation cloud solutions that are driven by the need to collaborate and communicate more effectively with co-workers, partners and customers for better business results with the ease of a consumer like experience. Avaya Collaborative Cloud is a robust framework that enables organizations to build, deliver, use, and enhance cloud communication services and applications transforming the way people work together. Avaya Collaborative Cloud is delivered over a single, open, scalable communications architecture from Avaya and its partners, with a network infrastructure extending across the entire enterprise, offering a rich and compelling suite of Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center (CC) solutions from the world s proven communication leader. Other vendors require developers to use the vendor s entire solution, from the proprietary computing platform, all the way to their private suite of cloud applications. In contrast, the open platform of Avaya provides organizations and partners with complete flexibility to choose all of the various networking components, applications, and service components, and deployment model, regardless of vendor. With an open platform, the Avaya Collaborative Cloud enables organizations to leverage their existing investments in computing resources and on-premise systems. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud was built leveraging the following Avaya strengths: Award-Winning Business Collaboration Applications The industry leading UC, CC and video applications of Avaya transform the communications and collaboration environment. Avaya now offers the flexibility to deploy these applications within a private cloud or as a hosted service through partners, depending on the needs of an organization. avaya.com 6

7 Cloud-Grade Network Infrastructure The innovative Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) serves as the foundation for the private cloud network by combining Ethernet switching, wireless networking, along with branch and remote access solutions. Avaya enables a simplified, open standards cloud-grade infrastructure that can be extended organizationwide, from data center to desktop. Private Cloud Provisioning and Orchestration Avaya s Virtualization Provisioning Service (VPS) automates data center provisioning and provides integration between the virtualized server environment and the virtualized network environment. Along with the Avaya Configuration and Orchestration Manager, Avaya enables comprehensive and easy-to-use administration of the private cloud. Avaya Collaborative Cloud Customer and Partner Focus Areas Avaya Collaborative Cloud is offered via four customer and partner-focused solutions providing the option to build, deliver, use, or enhance an organization s cloud communication services and applications: BUILD: Avaya can help organizations build their own private clouds for simple, secure, flexible, access to Avaya UC and CC solutions as well as cloud services from other vendors. The array of networking solutions simplifies the network and can make IT staff more efficient. With less time spent on manual configuration changes and complex change control processes, more time can be spent on forward-looking initiatives. DELIVER: Cloud service providers who want to accelerate business growth and create new business opportunities can deliver Avaya s industry leading collaboration applications and services over a single, open, scalable architecture from their datacenter. This enables cloud service providers to build and offer differentiated UC and CC solutions to their customers in a utility-based fashion, and use the open SIP and web-based interfaces to add their own tailored business solutions. USE: Organizations who do not want to build their own environments can use the Avaya Collaborative Cloud to access Avaya s collection of UC and CC applications and services in a hosted model. Avaya customers benefit from economies of scale, with services that easily scale as the business grows, and optimum flexibility when accessing communication and collaboration solutions from Avaya though its cloud service provider partners. avaya.com 7

8 ENHANCE: By providing advanced interaction with Avaya s cloud-based applications and platforms, developers and eco-system partners can utilize Avaya Collaborative Cloud to create and extend a wide variety of business communication and collaboration applications. This enables new types of innovative applications and services to be created either on-premise or in the cloud which work together with the Avaya Collaborative Cloud to solve the organization s unique business challenges. Avaya Collaborative Cloud leverages the web development languages and skills at the center of today s cloud services. Development partners can simply and quickly build social, collaboration, and communication applications. And finally, the Avaya Collaborative Cloud web-service API simplifies integration and interaction with the broad range of organization and consumer-based services. Figure 1. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud is an innovative framework that combines the collaboration and networking services organizations and service providers need to effectively build, deliver, use, or enhance their communications. Avaya Managed Services Avaya offers a suite of professional services to help organizations and service providers plan, design, build, install, and manage their private, public, and hybrid cloud networks. Starting with business and ROI justification, to auditing of existing infrastructure, to assembling a migration plan and executing the installation Avaya s qualified professionals will ease the burden of change while helping to ensure minimal disruptions and a smooth adoption of the new architecture. avaya.com 8

9 Avaya Communication Outsourcing Service (COS) offers a higher level of managed services by serving as a client s communications arm, integrating directly with their IT processes and managing their overall communications functions (e.g., production, billing, operations, and more). Avaya COS custommanaged services are designed for two types of businesses: those who are ready to migrate their aging infrastructure and transform it with advanced capabilities, but may have constraints around internal resources or budget; and those who are not ready for a technology transformation, but want to improve the cost-efficiency and performance of their existing infrastructure. Avaya COS helps companies dramatically increase performance, reduce costs, and accelerate the transformation of their communications environments. With COS, Avaya takes on the task of managing all of a company s communications operations to help them compete in a new era of advanced collaboration. Summary Cloud computing is here to stay. Organizations and service providers are now looking for a partner that can meet all of their cloud communications solution requirements in a single extensible, open, and scalable platform. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud provides all of that and more, with almost endless possibilities for organizations, service providers, and eco-system partners alike. The move to cloud communications will be a gradual evolution, not a revolution. It will be led by applications and ever-increasing end user expectations. The end result will be a hybrid model for most organizations, with a blend of both public and private cloud offerings. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud was designed for this hybrid environment, living seamlessly alongside the on-premise solutions that organizations have chosen to retain. For more information on the Avaya Collaborative Cloud, please visit us on the web at avaya.com 9

10 About Avaya Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks identified by,, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. 03/12 UC7026 avaya.com 10