Avaya Data Solutions Launches New Products to Drive Greater Business Value, Performance and Competitive Advantage

Shifting Market Away From "One Size Fits All" Data Solutions

LAS VEGAS, NV--(26 April, 2010) -  INTEROP 2010 -- Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications systems, software and services, today at Interop 2010 unveiled new data products that are faster, more cost-effective, and are specifically designed to support the growing needs of today's bandwidth-hungry video and unified communications (UC) applications. These products are designed to address the main challenge that enterprises face today: how to cost-effectively add the bandwidth needed to position them for growth.

"The days of the 'one size fits all' network solutions are over," said Kevin Kennedy, President and Chief Executive Officer, Avaya. "The Avaya Data Solutions business is positioned to play a critical role in Avaya's growth as we lead the industry to 'Fit for Purpose' data and SIP-based communications technologies that will redefine the IT value proposition and offer the best return on investment for business communications."

'Fit for Purpose' network solutions are designed to deliver unique communications applications -- the specific tools needed by a specific company -- better and cheaper. Contrary to traditional, overly-complex, inefficient systems that perform a myriad of functions companies don't need or use, this architecture is designed to deliver a specified return on investment.

"Avaya is bringing to market an innovative data portfolio that delivers 'no compromise' reliability, scalability and efficiency. Enterprises should never have to compromise one aspect of network performance for another, and Avaya's Data portfolio delivers all three," said Zeus Kerravala, Distinguished Research Fellow, Yankee Group.

Leveraging its leadership in the real-time business communications and applications market, Avaya's latest product offerings include four solutions that unify previously disparate networking elements to increase network dependability, efficiency and scalability. These products include:
Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8800 - to help enterprise campuses and data centers optimally boost capacity to embrace UC, virtualisation and unified wireless solutions.
Avaya Wireless LAN 8100 Series - an advanced Enterprise Class 802.11n wireless solution that easily and seamlessly extends UC applications to mobile users.
Avaya Unified Communications Management (UCM), Configuration and Orchestration Manager (COM) - a high-density, high-performance and resilient network management application that is part of the Unified Communications Management (UCM) solution that can more effectively manage multi-user configuration, provisioning and troubleshooting for a wide range of enterprise technologies.
Avaya Advanced Gateway 2330 - a flexible SIP gateway providing cost-effective, survivable voice services for branch locations, and is upgradable to support a full suite of routing and WAN services.

"With the introduction of Avaya's data solutions, we can help enterprises more easily adapt to business needs by delivering immediate and long term value," said Joel Hackney, President, Avaya Data Solutions. "With solutions that provide seven times more resiliency, 20 times better performance, 40 percent more energy efficiency and approximately 50 percent better total cost of ownership, customers can count on us to improve the value they derive from their technology investments."

Additional details on Avaya's Data solutions offerings include the following:

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 8800 - Campus LAN Core and Data Center
Available immediately, this is the latest evolution of the Avaya ERS 8000 series of products. The Avaya ERS 8800 consolidates a number of hardware and software advancements to deliver a future-ready platform that more cost-effectively unifies the network core and edge, as well as unification of wired and wireless architectures. It offers increased reliability and scalability to help provide investment protection and a clear migration path for customers. It is also designed to help enterprises transition to a highly-virtualised application model and is especially suited to support bandwidth-hungry video applications. The solution provides more than a 150 percent increase in memory while using approximately 33 percent less power compared to existing 8600 options. It is also available in a small footprint chassis option to deliver advanced features to smaller networks in a much more cost-effective manner. The ERS 8800 is especially suited for campus core deployments such as in the finance, education, manufacturing, healthcare and hospitality industries.

"As a leading higher education provider, we are constantly faced with meeting our students' ever growing appetite for bandwidth, especially as we add more tools for online and video learning," said Michael Vertefeuille, Chief Operating and Information Technology Officer, University of Connecticut School of Business. "Avaya continues to provide us with the highest level of reliability, and their new ERS 8800 product provides an innovative, cost-effective solution to meet growing capacity demands today, while providing a platform to help us continue our ever expanding move towards virtualisation and differentiated services. In addition, Avaya's pricing models continue to save us up to 20 percent per year in capital and maintenance costs when compared to competitive products."

Avaya Wireless LAN 8100 Series - Advanced Enterprise Class 802.11n Wireless
Targeted for availability in mid-2010, the WLAN 8100 Series combines the latest 802.11n industry standard with a new, next-generation architecture that addresses the emerging 'wireless as primary access' environment while delivering high resiliency, efficiency and scalability. Avaya WLAN 8100's innovative 'split plane' architecture helps eliminate the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of today's overlay wired/wireless networks with a simplified, truly unified solution optimised for voice, UC and video applications. The solution helps reduce costs while providing a full 802.11n solution including a wireless controller (WC 8180), 802.11n wireless access points (WAP 8120), management software and partnerships for enhanced application support. This solution is especially suited for medium to large enterprises, such as healthcare, education and hospitality facilities.

"With the WLAN 8100, Avaya provides a truly unified wireless/wired architecture that allows customers to reduce the total cost of ownership of their wireless network while benefiting from greater wireless capacity, performance and coverage. In addition, Avaya is the only vendor today to deliver an integrated wired, wireless and voice network management solution," added Yankee Group's Kerravala.

Avaya Unified Communications Management (UCM), Configuration and Orchestration Manager (COM)
This latest module in the Avaya UC Management suite (Avaya UCM) is a real-time, web-based, multi-user network configuration management solution that offers best-in-class configuration, provisioning and troubleshooting for a wide range of enterprise technologies. Avaya COM offers intuitive wizards and templates to simplify configuration of complex network technologies including SMLT/MLT, Multicast, Routing, VLAN and VRF. It provides centralised 'off-box' element management to address the needs associated with managing inventory, updates, as well as device and user access control. Acting as a unified configuration management platform, it delivers an extensible architecture allowing it to support pluggable device add-ons through data-driven development models and loadable software components. It offers customers significant cost savings by enabling up to five times faster installation and three times faster configuration times while also helping prevent manual configuration errors.

The Avaya Unified Communications Management solution, of which Avaya COM is a key component, is a one-stop-shop portal that seamlessly manages data, voice, wired and wireless networks as well as heterogeneous network infrastructures, while simplifying network requirements associated with managing faults, installation, configuration, performance, IP Flow, QoS policies, telephony and messaging.

"For the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Bell had to provide an always-on, converged network that could support all the network traffic needed to run the Games and manage it to deliver peak performance," said Kevin Harshaw, Senior Director, Olympic Operations, Bell. "With Avaya Visualisation Performance and Fault Manager and its real-time network monitoring, key performance indicators and extensive knowledge of network devices, we were able to monitor device health degradation and react to it before it impacted the network. While successfully managing 55,000 interfaces, Avaya Unified Communications Management was a key element in allowing Bell to deliver a flawless network for the Games."

Avaya Advanced Gateway 2330 - Survivable Voice and Data for the Branch
Targeted for availability in the early summer of 2010, The Avaya Advanced Gateway 2330 is a flexible branch gateway solution that enables enterprises to reliably extend centralised UC services to remote users. Interoperable with Avaya Aura™ and other Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) servers, it can provide local branch connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) as well as SIP survivability in case of IP wide-area network failure or service outages. The Advanced Gateway 2330 can also be software upgraded to a full suite of routing and wide-area networking (WAN) services to provide feature-rich voice and data services in a single multi-purpose platform, consolidating multiple devices and reducing branch deployment costs. The Advanced Gateway 2330 is available in multiple configurations to address a range of remote branch site needs and sizes.