9 October 2009

Avaya, the telecommunications outfit spun out of Lucent in 2000 and taken private by Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital for $8.2 billion in 2007, the company that's buying Nortel's Enterprise Division for $900 million, a move that will recombine Northern Electric and Western Electric, entities that haven't been together since 1949, means to announce a virtualized unified communications solution today targeted at SMBs.

The widgetry is a version of the Aura solution the company brought out for the large-scale enterprise in May. It's supposed to be one of the first solutions to use standards-based virtualization for real-time communications - and Avaya thinks so much of virtualization - the use of software to run multiple applications on a single piece of hardware at the same time - that it says it will be its de facto method of deploying applications from here on out.

Avaya has rolled its own middleware based on Linux and the open source Xen virtualization projection to make unified communications and collaboration more practical and affordable for the mid-sized company. It says its new mid-size Aura can support 2,400 users and 250 locations on a single high-end Intel Nehalem server at prices starting at 60 bucks a seat.


Besides saving money, the widgetry is supposed to reduce complexity and power consumption and, compared to rival systems, obviously needs a whole lot less hardware, which explains why it's cheaper. Avaya calculates that Aura takes 80% less hardware than Microsoft, which isn't running communications of its Hyper-V hypervisor, and 65% less than Cisco, which isn't doing real-time. The less machinery, the less power, cooling and maintenance is needed, making the widgetry more environmentally friendly and lowering its total cost of ownership.

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