Avaya touts virtual comms for mid-sized firms

Aura system cheaper and less complex.

Avaya has released a version of its Aura communications systems designed for mid-sized businesses.

The Avaya Aura Solution for Midsize Enterprises can reduce complexity, save money and provide a range of communications services, according to the firm.

It is pitched at companies with as few as 100 workers, but can scale up to 2,400 users across 250 locations.

"When we launched Avaya Aura in May it provided a breakthrough solution for large enterprises looking to run unified communications and contact centre systems more efficiently," said Alan Baratz, senior vice president at Avaya.

"With the release of the Avaya Aura Solution for Midsize Enterprises, we provide the same high-performing functionality to even more businesses."

Aura is a single server comms tool that uses virtualisation software. Jirina Yates, head of field marketing at Avaya, claimed that it can let companies use as much as 75 percent less hardware, and can be overseen and managed using a dashboard.

Yates added that the system uses the Xen Hypervisor so that it can be as open as possible, and save customers from being locked in to one particular vendor.

"Aura is our core communications group of products. We have used virtualisation to help firms save money on hardware. Less hardware is cheaper to cool and uses less energy," she explained.

"We used Xen Hypervisor over VMware and the Microsoft equivalent to show our commitment to open standards."

Avaya claimed that the system can be rolled out in two hours, and offers built-in remote monitoring, no single point of failure and an optional backup server for redundancy.