Avaya is planning a core server with which customers and independent software vendors can easily build presence, voice and other communications modes into business applications.
SIP Application Server is software based on the platform of the same name that Avaya bought last year when it acquired Ubiquity Software. Ubiquity had developed the platform for carriers to create new customer services, but Avaya has modified it for deployment in corporate networks, the company says.
SIP Application Server, due in 2009, unifies access to shared resources such as media servers, presence servers and communications services, such as messaging and recording, says Karyn Mashima, Avaya’s senior vice-president for Strategy and Technology, Mashima, who spoke during the company’s analyst conference this week.
Developers that want to incorporate these or other features into business applications can do so by writing code to the server, and the server will draw in the other elements needed to execute them.
For example, a supply-chain application that lists vendors could be written so running a mouse over the name tells their presence status and clicking on the name calls them on the phone. The supply-chain application would interface directly with SIP Application Server, which would interact with the presence server and the call server to enable the features.
Initially, Avaya will write its own applications for SIP Application Server, but will eventually open it up to ISVs and customers, says interim CEO Charles Giancarlo.
The server parallels efforts by Microsoft with its Unified Communications Server, Cisco with its WebEx Connect, Siemens with its OpenScape Unified Communications Server and NEC’s Spherical Web Services, says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with the Yankee Group.
“The winners of UC long-term will be those that figure out how to make UC pervasive,” Kerravala says. “How do I get presence capability into more applications, click-to-call into more applications? To me, that’s more important than the UC platforms themselves because that’s what will make UC ubiquitous.”
According to an IDC study published in August, many businesses are interested in UC, with about a quarter of those deploying it in a few branch offices, about a fifth saying they did so at a large number of sites and about a fifth saying they deployed it corporatewide.
The Avaya server is scheduled to be available next year, Giancarlo says.
