Avaya, a company specialized in enterprise communications systems, software and services, has added new capabilities and customers for Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE), Avaya’s software solution for embedding real-time communications into business applications. Using Avaya ACE, organizations across industries are finding it easier to create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) that streamline business collaboration, speed workflows and reduce costs.

New capabilities in Avaya ACE Release 2.3 include:

• Richer integration with Avaya Aura® through a broad set of packaged applications and Web services available on the Avaya Aura platform.
• A new client-side add-in for Microsoft Communicator that allows employees to click-to-call from online or premises-based Microsoft Communicator clients and engage in the conversation using their Avaya desktop phones. This cost-effective, streamlined, single-client experience is backed by Avaya Aura’s industry-leading security, reliability and functionality and can be integrated under the Microsoft Office Communications Server standard client access license1.
• A packaged application to embed voice in the latest release of IBM® Lotus Notes® and Sametime®. Employees can click-to-call and see telephony presence from within Lotus Release 8.5.1 while using deskphones from Avaya or other vendors.
• A new toolkit for Avaya Aura that gives IT developers more control designing communications sessions whereby multiple actions can be triggered by specific criteria during the call setup. For example, a legal firm could build an application that identifies a client’s incoming call, automatically records the call, sends the recording to a transcription service and bills the client.

Avaya ACE can reduce development times for CEBP solutions by as much as 80 percent over traditional CTI methods. Programmers with limited communications expertise can easily embed real-time communications in business applications and workflows using Avaya ACE’s Web Services, open standards and packaged applications, and can use virtually any modern development environment to build applications that integrate with communications systems from a variety of vendors.

"Unified communications solutions alone provide significant value; however, when they are used to accelerate the business their value is multiplied," said Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner, Wainhouse Research, LLC. "Companies need tools like Avaya ACE that let software developers easily embed real-time communications and collaboration capabilities in line of business and customer-facing applications. This is where companies can see tremendous ROI on their investment in a UC environment."

Customers Reap Advantages of Avaya ACE
Avaya ACE drives delay out of business processes by allowing organizations to easily automate communications-intensive procedures and tasks. In healthcare, Florida Hospital used Avaya ACE to improve its regulatory compliance process methodology and reduce the time nurses spend on associated administrative tasks. Florida Hospital has approximately 200 emergency code carts that require one to two system checks per day. A new desktop application developed using Avaya ACE communication-enables the record-keeping and notification requirements for these checks. Now, once a nurse inspects a cart the application immediately contacts the appropriate departments concerning any code cart component failures to ensure prompt maintenance and eliminate time spent calling the department to correct the issue. By using Avaya ACE with automated reminders and electronic reporting, the hospital expects to decrease the time taken by this routine task and focus it on time with the patient.

"Our hospital is always looking for ways to improve patient safety and make our processes more efficient. By integrating communications with our emergency equipment management system, this solution gives us increased accountability with safety compliance processes," said Jason Aspinwall, director, Clinical Applications, Florida Hospital.

The City of Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada integrated its existing communications system and service provided by Bell Aliant with Microsoft OCS 2007 using Avaya ACE. The city calculates this implementation reduced operating costs by 29 percent compared to other integration alternatives. According to Ian MacKinnon, manager of Information Technology for the City of Saint John:

"A flexible, advanced and reliable IT and communications infrastructure is crucial to our municipal government business operations. The latest in unified communications products and services such as those provided by Avaya and Bell Aliant are key to enabling our workforce with current and future productivity improvements."

Avaya ACE Enable Channel Partners to Deliver Superior Solutions to Customers
Avaya Connect channel partners are taking advantage of Avaya ACE packaged applications and the developer toolkit to build differentiated CEBP solutions for their customers. Bell Aliant, one of North America’s largest Service Providers and an Avaya channel partner, has worked closely with Avaya to help business customers understand the value of CEBP:

"Adding communications functionality to business applications easily and affordably allows enterprises to create innovative solutions and models that can differentiate their business in terms of service, savings or productivity," said Joe Mosher, vice president, Marketing, Bell Aliant. "Bell Aliant will participate in this emerging growth market by making these application capabilities available through various approaches, including both hosted and custom solutions."

Sabio, a UK-based, leading Avaya channel partner certified at the Platinum level, successfully integrated Avaya ACE capabilities into a proof of concept environment within a few days. Sabio sees value in Avaya ACE developer toolkits for reducing integration costs and allowing high level communication functions to be easily incorporated into end customer applications.

CROSS Telecom, a Platinum-certified Avaya Connect channel partner, sees great potential for innovation with Avaya ACE toolkits. According to David Lover, CTO for CROSS Telecom:

"With Avaya ACE you have the concept of a communications mashup. You can take the services provided by different components such as voicemail, web portal, or contact center and combine them together right away to create an application that is totally new, totally unique, and totally different from anything a manufacturer would typically give you in 18 months."

Avaya has a broad ecosystem of partners for delivery of innovative solutions that address an organization’s business, end user, and infrastructure needs. Avaya Professional Services, members of the Avaya DevConnect program, service integrators and IT groups are creating mainstream communications-enabled applications designed to help organizations ride the next wave of business process improvement.

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