Interop: Avaya Touts Data Networking Business With Four New Releases
Avaya will be officially debuting the products, which include an Ethernet routing switch, 802.11n wireless offerings, and a SIP gateway, at Interop in Las Vegas this week.
According to Jake Power, a former Nortel marketing executive and now director of marketing for enterprise data networks at Avaya, it'll be the first of several strategic product releases Avaya has planned for this calendar year.
"A lot of customers who had pressed the pause button in 2009 based on the whole Chapter 11 scenario at Nortel, and well, we're starting to see some momentum again," Power said. "Financial stability is a huge thing taken off the table with us coming into Avaya."
The new products, from Avaya Data Solutions, include Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8800, designed for enterprise data centers migrating to unified communications and virtualized environments, Avaya Wireless LAN 8100 Series, which uses "split plane" architecture for wired/wireless architecture in UC environments, and Avaya Configuration and Orchestration Manager (COM), a management application for use in Avaya's Unified Communications Management suite.
There's also Avaya Advanced Gateway 2330, a session-initiated protocol (SIP) gateway that provides voice services for branch offices in its basic configuration, and can be upgraded to include routing and WAN services, too.
"It's a great example of us integrating with the heritage Avaya voice folks," Power said of the Gateway. "It adds pure voice and SIP survivability, but it adds data functionality to a branch device, too. It's not just voice, but also data, in a flexible chassis format."
The new products, according to Avaya, are in line with the "fit for purpose" strategy it's promised will drive product development going forward.
"There are folks out there that try to be all things to all people, whether it's 'the human network' or whatever else," Power said, in a reference to Cisco. "Our game is not to be all things to all people. We want to be the epicenter of the networking market and delivering the most crucial requirements of the networking piece."
All products will be available by May 1, Power said.
Asked whether Avaya's move to develop more wireless LAN products in-house in house effectively means the end of its WLAN OEM agreement with Trapeze Networks, Power said Avaya will "not be walking away from that relationship." The Trapeze agreement will continue with previously released Avaya products, he said.
Watch for additional product debuts in June, Power said, and more launches from Avaya later in the year.
"There's a cadence of how we go to market now. It makes a lot of sense to go out at the biggest times of the year," Power said. "But this we wanted to do for Interop to show our commitment specifically around data. There was a decision made in the product group that we'd make an exception and pull data out for this one."