Avaya launches carrier-hosted solution

Avaya, which until recently has kept its service provider group under fairly tight wraps, today announced a new hosted voice-over-IP solution aimed at carriers. The Avaya Hosted IP Telephony offering is targeting both traditional businesses looking for a carrier-hosted IP telephony service as well as contact centers.

Initially, the company is focusing on a solution that would fit on the upper end of the small business market, noting in its announcement that it can be effective for as few as 100 users. On the call center side, the company is looking at customers with as few as 30 agent stations.

"What you have to do early when you’re growing a substantial business is that you’ve got to take it one step at a time," said Denzil Samuels, vice president and general manager of the service provider division for Avaya.

In a related announcement, Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company became the first public customer of the solution today, announcing a three-year agreement through which it will market the Hosted Contact Center solution from Avaya to small and medium-sized enterprises in the Philippines market. The carrier’s service PLDT On-Call is a hosted contact center service.

The Avaya offering also marks the first time the company has put its software on industry standard blade servers, Samuels said. The company is working with IBM’s eServer BladeCenter and BladeCenter T systems, which are integrated with Avaya’s software.

The company’s entry into hosted solutions comes at a time when the market is becoming increasingly crowded. According to TSS Partners, the hosted solutions market is expected to grow from around $1 billion in 2004 to nearly $17 billion by 2008. For Avaya, which spun off from Lucent several years ago, the challenge initially has been getting back into the carrier’s thought process, Samuels said. From a geographic perspective, that meant focusing on carriers in rapidly growing markets like Asia.

"Two years ago we said ‘It doesn’t make sense to be targeting a lot of North American service providers,’" he said. "We didn’t want to go and boil the ocean so we wanted to be very specific on who we targeted."

Now, however, the company is looking as several opportunities within North America, he added.

"It’s important to bring in net new business to Avaya and bring in service providers who would have a good presence in the mid market," Samuels said.