Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya

The goal - Maximize value through integration

Enhance collaborative communications at the desktop. Simplify your workers' access to all of their messaging—e-mails, voicemails, faxes, calendar entries. Improve the effectiveness of group collaboration across your enterprise. Provide enhanced support for mobility. IBM and Avaya have partnered to deliver unified communications solutions designed to increase productivity, accelerate revenue, and cut your telecommunications and travel costs.

The advantage - Click to communicate

Our unified communications solutions bring unique value to clients with fully featured, integrated telephony, conferencing and flexible unified messaging. Avaya extends click-to-communicate capabilities into IBM® Lotus® Sametime®, Lotus Notes®, Lotus Quickr™ and Lotus Connections, and unified messaging into Lotus Domino® and Lotus Notes. In addition, we unify Avaya audio conferencing with Sametime instant messaging and Web conferencing. And we provide the expertise to help you implement your solution in the most efficient manner. Together, we can help you embed communications into your workflow, empowering greater levels of productivity and reducing latency in business processes.

The benefits - See savings in your productivity and budget

Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya can lead to substantial savings by leveraging internal Voice over IP (VoIP) where possible, and the enterprise private branch exchange (PBX) calling plan when employees click to call from different applications on their desktop. Calls are sent through the lowest cost avenues, even rerouting employees' mobile phone calls to make them appear—and be charged—as though they are running through the office line. Our solutions also provide many productivity benefits.

Integrated telephony can enable workers to:

• Initiate calls right from the application they are currently using, such as Lotus Sametime, Lotus Notes or Microsoft® Office applications.
• See if colleagues are available, and easily connect with them if they are.
• Automatically search corporate directories and dial phone numbers.
• Place calls from remote locations as though they are on the corporate phone network—maintaining enterprise identity and presence for all inbound and outbound calls.

Integrated audio and Web conferencing can enable workers to:

• Take advantage of a range of conferencing capabilities to both improve the effectiveness of meetings and reduce the need for travel.
• Initiate an integrated audio and Web conference instantly from Lotus Sametime, or schedule a combined audio and Web conference with reserved ports.

Unified messaging can enable workers to:

• Read e-mails, voicemails and faxed messages all within their inbox.
• Call in to access and hear voicemails, e-mails, calendar entries and faxes.
• Simplify management of voicemail messages by storing them in the same Domino server as e-mail.

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The goal - Stop wasting time

How much time do you spend chasing multiple people to resolve an important task or request? How many mobile phone minutes do you burn up because you have to call into a conference while away from your office? Do your colleagues always know when you are available and how you can be reached? Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya are designed to bring together all of your communication methods, resulting in higher productivity, improved mobility and lower costs.

The advantage - Leverage reliable, proven technology

Avaya and IBM are market leaders in communications and collaboration with robust, scalable and proven offerings.

• IBM is Avaya's premium services partner, bringing worldwide services expertise and experience involving unified communications, IBM® Lotus® and Avaya communication products.
• IBM Lotus Sametime® is licensed by more than two dozen companies with greater than 100,000 users each.
• Lotus Notes® is licensed by 29 of the Global Fortune 50, and eight of the top ten worldwide banks.
• Avaya is number one in the marketplace for:
  • Enterprise telephony worldwide
  • Messaging
  • Audio conferencing

The benefits - Unify communications and messaging

By creating linkages across the full collaboration portfolio, our solutions can enable workers to click to call a colleague from many of the applications they use each day. For example, you can see a person's presence and click to call directly from your Lotus Notes e-mail or inbox, from Microsoft® Office, Outlook® or SharePoint® applications, and from Lotus Connections or Lotus Quickr™ profiles. You can also easily embed presence and click-to-call capabilities into situational applications built with Lotus Mashups.

Our solutions can also make virtual conferencing much easier, which can help you reduce your impact on the environment by limiting meeting-related travel. For example:

• You can select multiple people in Sametime and click to dial all of them at once, creating an instant conference call.
• You can easily link Avaya audio conferencing with Lotus Sametime Web conferencing and leverage embedded audio control capabilities for more productive meetings.
  • Click to join for faster entrance to meetings.
  • See who is in call and identify speakers.
  • Mute or disconnect participants.
  • Dial out to join new participants to your call.
  • Have the audio bridge dial out and bring you in.
  • Lock the conference.

In addition, IBM and Avaya unified communications solutions can help increase productivity and enable more mobility with unified messaging capabilities. For example:

• You can read e-mails, faxes and voicemails from your Lotus Notes inbox.
• You can call into your voicemail, and not only hear voicemail messages, but also have your calendar entries and e-mails read to you over the phone.

The approach - IBM and Avaya help city respond faster

IBM and Avaya teamed up to develop a call and emergency response center for a key U.S. city. The center consolidates and houses all public safety and nonpublic safety communications for police, fire, rescue and emergency responders for the city. The center has successfully created a workplace conducive to ensuring employees responsible for these critical functions are equipped and empowered to be successful.

The city has realized many benefits from this project:

• The center handles more than 2.5 million calls annually, with most emergency calls answered in less than one second.
• Response times have measurably improved—the average of all 9-1-1 and Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) calls answered within five seconds has increased from 94.3% to 97.5%.
• The city has improved service delivery to citizens and increased efficiencies through shared resources
• The consolidated communications center allows a single entity to provide common services citywide and allows agencies to focus on their core missions.

The financial advantage - Lower costs for higher returns

Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya can lead to savings in both time and costs by:

• Reducing the burden and costs associated with traveling for business meetings by providing an effective alternative.
• Lowering telecommunications costs significantly by leveraging the public branch exchange (PBX) plan, which chooses the best, low-cost path, whenever employees click to call.
• Speeding collaboration and decision making across the enterprise to complete revenue-generating processes—such as customer application processing, billing and sales—faster.
• Raising employee productivity and creating a more responsive organization.

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The issues - Bring together communications and collaboration

How can you better support your employees' need for efficient, streamlined communications across various devices, locations and applications? Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya can help you integrate telephony with collaboration software in a way that improves productivity and workflow. Support more capabilities for conferencing, telephony and unified messaging, while simplifying systems management requirements.

The benchmark - Rely on our combined leadership

Avaya's expertise in business communication applications complements IBM's extensive capabilities in middleware, collaboration and IT services. Our combined leadership in telephony and collaboration provides a solid foundation for unified communications.

• IBM® Lotus® Sametime® is the most deployed enterprise instant messaging solution.
• There are 130 million seats of Lotus Notes® licensed around the world.
• Avaya actively embraces a multi-vendor strategy, integrating tightly with several Lotus business applications.
• Avaya one-X Mobile is supported on devices that support the Palm, RIM, Symbian, Microsoft® Windows Mobile® and J2ME™ environments, as well as the more than 500 wireless application protocol (WAP)-enabled mobile devices available today.

The components - Integrate technologies for a unified infrastructure

Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya are built on the integration of IBM Lotus collaboration software with Avaya voice communications applications. Our solutions span telephony integration, conferencing integration and unified messaging integration.
Telephony integration provides click-to-call capabilities and aggregated phone plus instant messaging presence in Lotus Sametime through two options:

• Place calls via the Sametime user interface.
  • Avaya AES-based integration at server with no client download
  • Shows telephony presence in Lotus Sametime
  • Enables both click-to-call and click-to-conference capabilities

• Place calls via Avaya one-X Communicator or Avaya IP Softphone v6.
  • Control desktop, home, mobile phone or talk through the PC
  • Easy access to all Avaya telephony features, including conferencing, video and extend to cellular

Conferencing integration includes the ability to click to conference from Lotus software.

• Calls are placed via the Avaya Meeting Exchange bridge.
• Multi-party click-to-conference capabilities are available.
• Click to conference is available from Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 and 8.0, as well as from IBM Lotus e-mail or instant messaging.
• Integrated conferencing scheduling is available.
• Avaya Meeting Exchange audio conferencing is also integrated with Lotus Sametime Web Conferencing.

Unified messaging integration includes:

• Unified access to e-mail and voicemail from Lotus Notes desktop, Web or phone using Avaya Modular Messaging.
• Speech access to voicemail, e-mail and calendar using Avaya one-X Speech.
• High scalability and availability.

Click to call and integrated presence can be extended beyond communications applications into business applications and workflow. Leverage the development flexibility of Lotus Expeditor and Lotus Mashup Center with the communication capabilities of Avaya.

The implementation - IBM and Avaya facilitate faster emergency response

IBM and Avaya developed a call and emergency response center for a key U.S. city to consolidate all safety communications functions. The call center is supported with a common technology infrastructure which provides full communication and interface for the critical business functions associated with public safety first responders and constituent services.

The center includes Avaya computer-aided dispatch software, an Avaya digital voice logging and recording system and Avaya Telephony System. It also includes audio-visual systems, an integrated network monitoring system, a local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) security infrastructure, public safety radio systems, a timing system and radio systems. The technology infrastructure, in combination with the facility design, allows for the integration of additional call centers.

The cost of ownership - Optimize your infrastructure

Unified communications solutions from IBM and Avaya are designed to deliver low cost of ownership through consolidation and integration of technology across your enterprise. Our solutions can help you:

• Reduce server and administrator costs by implementing unified messaging.
• Leverage past investments in technology by integrating unified communications capabilities within your existing systems and applications.
• Facilitate service consistency across platforms and locations.
• Ease deployment of new services and applications.

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• White paper: Extend the value of IBM Lotus applications to increase productivity with Avaya Unified Communications (2.73MB)

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