Avaya Malaysia announced its Avaya Desktop Video Device in Kuala Lumpur on 21 September, 2010.

Essentially, an The Android-based tablet, the desktop videoconferencing and collaboration device features the Avaya Flare Experience, the industry's first to enable simultaneous user communication and collaboration using video, voice and text-based applications on a single screen.

Avaya Flare provides users with quick and easy access to desktop voice and video, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, e-mail, presence, Instant Messaging, audio, video and web conferencing, a consolidated view of multiple directories, context history, photo album, phonebook, instant messaging, SMS and more.

Flare has central spotlight which highlights active or in-progress communications. For example, a user can make a voice or conference call by dragging one or more of the contacts from his personal or corporate phonebook into the spotlight to initiate the call, while an on-screen pop-up keyboard lets him SMS and instant messaging as well for a rich, multimedia communications experience.

Moreover, as it runs Android, users can download and install additional productivity and business applications from the Android Market in countries where this is supported.

“Avaya also provides a platform for developers to create applications for it with the Avaya ACE developer tool-kit,” said Teh Chai Peng, Avaya Malaysia country director.

The Desktop Video Device was developed especially for the Avaya Flare Experience, with an 11.6 in, high-definition (HD) touchscreen, supports HD video and wideband audio. It has a HD 720-pixel camera and HD-quality voice supported by built-in dual microphones.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications is enabled using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard over Ethernet or WiFi and via a third-party 3G HSPA cellular modem-dongle plugged into its USB port, thus enabling portability.

Its three USB ports also enable the connection of an optional external keyboard and a mouse, or a USB drive. It also supports Bluetooth and has a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port for an external monitor. Upcoming versions will support remote access over VPN connections and 4G access.

For now, the Avaya Flare Experience is only available with the Desktop Video Device but Avaya plans to soon make it also available on desktop and notebook PCs, Internet tablets and smartphones.

The Avaya Flare Experience for Avaya 9600 Series Deskphones provides voice, conference control, instant messaging and presence capabilities plus desktop integration with Microsoft Outlook for contact management. These provide deskphone users with sidebar chat while talking on the phone, or to find contacts from various of directories.

The Avaya one-X Communicator is a desktop video soft client, which provides cost-effective SIP-based video in a comprehensive unified communications interface that offers tools such as instant messaging, presence, and click-to-video conference on desktop and notebook PCs, as well as A[[le iPads. It also integrates with desktop environments from Adobe, IBM and Microsoft.

Avaya also has terminals for small workgroups all the way to large conference room systems. while the Avaya Videoconferencing Manager 6.0 works across them and its conference scheduling, configuration and monitoring information is accessible from Avaya Aura Network Manager.

The Aura surrounding them all

Avaya Flare employs the Avaya Aura 6.0 solutions announced in July, including Avaya Aura Conferencing and Avaya Aura Messaging.

Avaya claims Avaya Aura to be the first true SIP protocol-based, unified communications architecture which bridges multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal communications, which makes video calls and conferencing as easy as making a telephone call using the same platform for both.

Spun off 10 years ago from the enterprise communications division of Lucent Technologies, Avaya's core competency has been enterprise voice using IP-based private branch exchanges (IP-PBX) and through its acquisition of Nortel in December last year, it also acquired Nortel's voice and data (primarily video) expertise.

However, the acquisition created a situation in which Avaya has to enable seamless communications between its customers' different types of equipment but since Avaya's philosophy is to not tell them to rip their existing equipment out and replace them with its equipment.

Instead it helps them protect their existing equipment via interface units called gateways, which enable  communications between them. This extends to legacy third party PBX, key telephone systems as well as smartphones.

While these equipment won't support all the features which Avaya equipment supports, it Aura enables whatever functions they may have to seamlessly communicate with the same functions in Avaya equipment and gives its customers the opportunity to purchase new equipment with more functions as and when needed.

“Aura provides a platform for our customers to have a centralised dial plan across what would otherwise be many isolated islands of communication and moreover reduces capital and operational expenses,” said Teh.

While these savings vary for every system, Tan estimates that Aura can save customers around 50% in capital expenditure (CAPEX) and its operational expenditure (OPEX), largely due to administrative costs, by a factor of 10-to-1.

“That's because our codecs can compress video bandwidth by up to 50% more than our competitors' equipment, she claimed.

Hence, businesses can integrate real-time video into their core Avaya Aura infrastructure for better control of costs, quality of service, administration and management, while adding video functionality to the network is as simple as adding video-capable endpoints since no overlay network is required.

However, while Avaya has supplied IP-PBX equipment for over 10 years, customers in ASEAN, including Malaysia have been slow to adopt them, though Teh said that interest has been increasing in Malaysia, thanks to the increase in broadband adoption and the growth in the number of smartphones used here.