Avaya’s EDP is a portfolio of solutions which help accelerate the development of communications-enabled applications. In a chat with Enterprise Channels Savio Tovar Dias, Director (Technical Operations, Global Growth Markets), Avaya talks about the enterprise application market.
1. Where’s the enterprise application market heading to in India?
The fastest growing demand in the region for enterprise applications in our view is not the applications themselves, but the ability to communication-enable applications within the enterprise to respond to growing disruptive trends of mobility, social, big data and cloud.
From Avaya’s perspective, the region’s enterprise has legacy unified communications (UC) tools that were developed in an era when workers were primarily deskbound and collaborated mostly with internal employees. Because of this, communications and collaboration tools today exist in silos. Workers are using business applications to conduct day-to-day work, and then UC tools are used for collaborating with other workers. But the nature of work has changed, and enterprises are building their competitive advantage on making quick decisions by involving the best people both inside and outside the organization. The big question therefore is how can employees have real-time access to the information they need to perform their jobs faster? This includes the ability to make quick decisions but also be able to respond to co-workers, customers, business partners and other members of the extended enterprise at the speed the business. The answer lies in bringing communications and applications together, to create communications-enabled business applications (CEBA) that integrate UC tools and information. In my view, this is what India needs the most in the next couple of years.
2. What are the top solutions from your portfolio in this domain?
Our latest innovation into the engagement environment is the Avaya Development Platform, or what we refer to as EDP. EDP is a portfolio of solutions which help accelerate the development of communications-enabled applications. Now, companies, partners, business analysts, and ISVs, in India can integrate voice, video, text, email and mobility seamlessly into breakthrough business applications. The portfolio includes the Avaya Engagement Development Platform, Avaya Snap-In modules, and the AvayaLive Collaboratory.
The success of the Avaya Engagement Environment is due in large part to the community of developers around the world creating new Snap-In modules. When used independently, or as part of a communications workflow, application developers can simply snap-in code modules and immediately integrate new functions.
Some examples of snap-in code includes the following:
- WebRTC – Gives users access to click-to-call capabilities and media directly from within their browsers to connect with a company’s contact center, offering the low effort experience that drives higher CSAT. Can be combined with other Snap-ins to capture customer behaviors, preferences, and browser history, and present that information to agents so they can steer conversations with customers, answering questions and resolving issues efficiently and positively. It can also be used for corporate intranet sites to improve the business efficiency of travel bookings, expense management, human resources, etc.
- Context Store – A simpler, more effective way to continuously track, collect, and share relevant customer and business information to improve real-time collaboration and customer engagement throughout the enterprise. By holding frequently requested data in memory, this Snap-in reduces the need to repeat queries to different systems to retrieve or validate data. This approach streamlines the aggregation of information across various enterprise and public sources to help ensure applications, services, and people make better real-time decisions.
- Work Assignment – Enables managers to create a matching service that can leverage real-time data to optimize use of business resources. Organizations’ application can tap cross-company data, making on-the-fly adjustments, to match a customer to the best available person. This extensible, highly scalable work distribution system uses data-analytics-driven routing to assign work items and speeds real time responses that are based on a company’s target goals and desired outcomes.
- Real-Time Speech – To combat the latency between insights discovered after the moment and to remain competitive and offer a consistent, differentiated, exceptional experience, organizations must be able to discover these insights, correct issues and capitalize on opportunities at the source in the moment…in real-time. This Snap-in integrates real-time speech search into enterprise and contact center applications and workflows to enable rapid development and deployment of speech services throughout environment.
The latest Snap-In from Avaya, available globally today, is the Avaya Engagement Assistant. Perfect for mobile employees, this Snap-in removes the burden of manually entering conference numbers and long teleconferencing bridge codes. Engagement Assistant provides users with “one-number conferencing” for all meetings on their Microsoft Outlook calendar. It consults a user’s Outlook calendar, helps select which meeting to join, and seamlessly connects them to the desired audio or video conferences. Engagement Assistant integrates with Microsoft Outlook calendaring and supports Avaya Aura Conferencing, Avaya Scopia, and other external conference bridge systems.
3. Do you provide vertical-specific solutions?
Creating a simpler and faster development environment is a positive step forward, but an obvious next question is how specifically will Engagement Development Platform solve customer problems, differently, for each customer at a time? An inherent value of the Avaya Engagement Development Platform is its flexibility to meet the individual demands of customers – and create differentiated value for those customers in their market spaces.
Here are some examples, taken from customer interactions, of this flexibility applied to specific customer problems:
A university is concerned about providing proactive support services to their students – particularly those at risk of dropping out. Engagement Development Platform, in conjunction with the university’s existing UC infrastructure and cloud applications, can provide alerts to counselors based on the student’s results and availability and offer simplified paths to establish a conversation, if appropriate.
A bank wants to customize call treatments at its branch locations providing direct access to account managers from high-value customers based on incoming calling line identification. The administration of these “white-list” customers must be accessible to the account managers and easily modified based on changing customer needs.
A manufacturer wants to leverage its sales force management tool to provide access to its mobile sales force based on the stage of pending deals. As deals move to the final sales stage, calls will be directed to the sales person’s direct mobile number, instead of being routed to a voicemail box– all without requiring any additional administration by the sales person.
A retailer wants to extend the “smart facilities management” capabilities deployed in its stores to include direct integration with existing Avaya collaboration capabilities, giving employees access to operations data and communications from anywhere in the store.
In these examples, Engagement Development Platform has given developers the opportunity to take existing core competencies and application solutions and rapidly integrate them with the UC platform to create tangible customer value. This is the real power of the Avaya Engagement Development Platform: melding existing Avaya communications and collaboration capabilities with the individual requirements that a customer is working to satisfy.
