BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - February 10, 2011) - Avaya Inc., a global leader in business collaboration systems, software and services, today announced the launch of new cloud-based, on-demand purchasing options and features for Avaya web.alive, the company's innovative, immersive web collaboration platform designed for businesses and organizations.
Avaya web.alive is a secure, immersive collaboration platform that uses personalized avatars and rich, spatial audio and visuals to expand on current modes of conferencing and collaboration. Using high-quality voice, visuals and content sharing capabilities, Avaya web.alive helps solve a number challenges to business collaboration with an easy and fun to use environment.
The new purchasing options make Avaya web.alive available as a service through a monthly subscription for individual hosts or via annual concurrent user based pricing. Customers can also opt to install and manage the software on their own servers. The flexibility of purchase options enables any size business or organization to use Avaya web.alive for meetings, training, or sales and service opportunities involving both internal and external participants.
In addition to the purchasing options, new features and capabilities in Avaya web.alive include:
- New 3D audio engine for dramatic spatial audio that helps participants better identify and understand who is speaking and their location within the environment.
- Built-in collaboration tools including desktop sharing and cooperative web browsing
- Avaya Aura SIP interface for integration with existing communications infrastructure enabling participants to join a collaboration session via the telephone or inside of the web.alive environment
- New templates that make it easy to design environments that meet the needs of a company or host.
- Downloadable SDK to enable customers or hosts to independently create and upload their own custom content.
- Analytics that provide the data to enhance collaboration, selling or learning efforts. For example, insight can be gained into traffic and conversation patterns, sales and presentation effectiveness, travel savings, etc. The notification engine can email contact center agents when customers have entered an Avaya web.alive sales or service.
"Meetings, seminars, classes, and even hallway conversations over the web can now be more social and truly engaging with Avaya web.alive," said Brett Shockley, vice president, Emerging Products and Technologies. "The cutting edge spatial audio and immersive collaboration technology allows our customers to achieve new levels effectiveness in remote collaboration. Avaya web.alive continues Avaya's innovative 'people-first' approach to delivering business collaboration solutions."
Avaya web.alive will be available from www.avayalive.com beginning March 1, 2011 in the U.S. via credit card purchase for $49/month for a single, named host that allows up to eight participants per session. MasterCard, Visa or American Express will be accepted online for monthly subscriptions. Annual concurrent user subscriptions are also available via purchase order.
CUSTOMERS
Carroll University in Waukesha Wisconsin has embraced Avaya web.alive for a number of programs, including student collaboration and tutoring, faculty academic advising and International education. The immersive web collaboration platform provides a highy cost-effective solution that expands access to academic resources and facilitates broader participation across diverse groups.
"Avaya web.alive allows us provide sophisticated resources to both students and faculty in a flexible, high energy environment. The Carroll community can participate and engage from wherever they are at any hour with great results," said John Arechavala, director of ITS Infrastructure Services, Carroll University. "A program sponsored by the International Study abroad group quadrupled their attendance over previous events. Our main speaker used a web.alive avatar to present a multimedia program in real-time from Lingnan University in Hong Kong -- fully interactive and complete with flash video and slides. Using web.alive's built-in analytics, we easily calculated how much the program saved the university. Web.alive allowed us to provide a high-quality professional program at a fraction of the cost over traditional methods."
The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) fosters entrepreneurship and promotes the success of companies that develop and deploy technology across industry sectors through educational and networking events, sponsoring research and more. MassTLC president and CEO Tom Hopcroft sees Avaya web.alive playing a key role in expanding access both inside and outside the MassTLC community:
"Avaya web.alive will enable speakers and participants to engage in events when they don't have the time to travel," said Hopcroft. "But perhaps more importantly, web.alive gives us a virtual commons that can trigger innovation through serendipitous meetings of people who normally may not interact with one another. It's the 'bump' factor -- web.alive allows people to bump into one another, start a conversation that grows into collaboration that can give rise to innovation.
Avaya Government Solutions has also been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for Avaya web.alive. The USDA award is part of the federal government's vGov initiative, a virtual government inter-agency partnership that also includes the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, U.S. Air Force and National Defense University. Avaya web.alive will enable the USDA to provide federal employees with a persistent 3D world that encourages interaction and can be used for collaboration, training, rehearsal, analysis, simulation, experimentation and socialization.
Links to additional materials:
To learn more about Avaya web.alive and download an avatar for a free demo of immersive web collaboration, go to http://avayalive.com/WaStore/
Videos:
Avaya web.alive Introduction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_ZVLQflpA
Avaya web.alive Basic Navigation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l5mWuALnCs
About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, data solutions, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.
Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Some of the key factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations include: our ability to develop and sell advanced communications products and services, including unified communications, contact centers and data solutions; our ability to develop our indirect sales channel; economic conditions and the willingness of enterprises to make capital investments; the market for advanced communications products and services, including unified communications and business collaboration solutions; our ability to remain competitive in the markets we serve; our ability to manage our supply chain and logistics functions; the ability to protect our intellectual property and avoid claims of infringement; our ability to effectively integrate acquired businesses into ours; our ability to maintain adequate security over our information systems and recover critical systems; environmental, health and safety laws, regulations, costs and other liabilities; our ability to mitigate risks associated with climate change; the ability to retain and attract key employees; risks relating to the transaction of business internationally; pension and post-retirement healthcare and life insurance liabilities; and liquidity and our access to capital markets. We caution you that the foregoing list of important factors may not contain all of the material factors that are important to you. For a further list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Contact Information:
Media Inquiries
Deb Kline
908-953-6179
klined@avaya.com
