Archive

Apple, Google and others reportedly have entered into a bidding war for the patents held by Nortel Networks, which is liquidating its assets in bankruptcy. Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2009 but failed to emerge successfully and began selling assets in mid-2009. Nortel...

Avaya has introduced its latest iteration of Avaya IP Office -- its flagship communications suite for small and medium-sized businesses. The high points of the upgrade are easier-to-use features, greater transparency into coworkers' presence, and a more intuitive interface. For starters, Avaya IP Of...

Seven months after Avaya closed its acquisition of Nortel and simultaneously released a road map for integrating the two product lines, Avaya has delivered on that plan. It is releasing a cornucopia of new and enhanced products that largely follow the promises Avaya made in January. "Most users on b...

With last summer's launch of Avaya Aura and the purchase of Nortel Enterprise Solutions and Nortel Government Solutions in December, Avaya has placed itself squarely in the No. 1 spot for the global enterprise telephony and unified communications, audio conferencing, enterprise messaging and contact...

I almost never attend a webinar unless I am speaking. When I need to know something, I usually get a one-on-one with a CEO or other leader of a company. They're very gracious with their time, and the tutelage helps me as an analyst, though often I don't run out and write something about my experie...

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least. Contact center managers have a never-ending desire to streamline operations to keep spending in check. If they're not focusing...

Avaya has launched Avaya IP Office, a new version of its flagship product line targeting the SMB space. Changes to the product, now in version 5, include new configurations for certain user roles, such as customer service agent or mobile worker, as well as new functionality. At the same time, the co...

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...

Avaya is redoubling its efforts to gain traction in the mid-market, a neglected but potentially very lucrative niche for contact center providers. To that end, Avaya has acquired Agile Software, the company from which it had been OEM-ing its main mid-market solution, Avaya Contact Center Express. Wi...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...

In Italy, Biesse Systems is a manufacturer of substantial size; its American subsidiary, though, is by any measure a small business, with under 200 employees. Still, Biesse America's communication needs rivaled that of a large enterprise. It needed to communicate with its parent in Italy regularly, ...

Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, has been on the job since March 2008. It is no small irony that one year ago he was tasked with the assignment of strengthening the services group's financial and operating performance -- a significant undertaking, given that the services division t...

Avaya is rolling out two new industry-specific applications at the National Retail Federation's annual trade show on Monday. One, Avaya Video Assist, leverages the company's contact center expertise. The other, In-Store Connect, allows retailers to do away with siloed commnication systems such as i...

This summer, Bob Lyons was tapped to lead Avaya's contact center division. The new general manager and vice president of customer service applications -- a relatively new position at Avaya -- joined the company at a crucial time. It was in the midst of reorganizing its operations around three busin...