Solution Brief - Avaya Centralized IP Telephony

Delivering the foundation for Unified Communications through application integration and consolidation

In today’s global and information-driven economy, companies across all industries face the challenge of workforces that are increasingly distributed, yet must work together more effectively than ever before to retain, attract and win customers. Unified communications addresses the challenges of these disparate workforces by simplifying how people connect and interact with one another as well as with today’s communication applications. With unified communications, presence, real-time communications (e.g., IM, telephony, and video and application sharing) and near-real-time communications (e.g., email and voicemail) are “unified” into a single environment that enables employees, partners and suppliers to collaborate in real time. Tight integration between enterprise applications and communications allows users to share information within a matter of seconds. Whether at an employee’s desktop or on the private and public networks that connect mobile workers, this unification makes life easier for users and IT personnel alike — and can lead to dramatic cost savings, improved productivity and increased revenue.

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Avaya: The unified communications leader
As unified communications takes businesses toward new frontiers, Avaya is at the forefront of developing innovative new technology, products and services that accelerate business processes and decision-making while protecting your existing investments. Avaya’s Centralized IP Telephony solution is an important first step that many enterprises are taking in the move to unified communications and communications-enabled applications.

Avaya Centralized IP Telephony
IP telephony is intrinsic to enabling unified communications and communications-enabled applications processes. As enterprise voice and data networks continue to converge with widespread acceptance of IP telephony, unified communications is the logical starting place to implement voice as an enterprise application. Avaya Centralized IP Telephony enables enterprises to migrate from a traditional distributed TDM voice network that’s based on multiple independent PBXs and separately managed key systems to a solution that consolidates multiple network management platforms and databases. By transforming their traditional dispersed network to a centralized one where everything is essentially “in one place”, businesses can begin realizing lower TCO and taking advantage of the speed and agility that’s required to roll out additional applications and services to end users.

A data center approach to voice networking? Why not?
Today, businesses around the world have implemented and are benefiting from the advantages of a data center model, including:
• Consistent user experience across the enterprise
• Centralized and simplified management and administration
• Economies of scale on network requirements
• Easier and faster rollout of new features functionality

It’s clear that data centers have demonstrated what can be achieved through centralization, which leads to the question, “Why not use the same model for voice?” Through Avaya’s Centralized IP Telephony solution, that’s exactly what your business can do to enjoy these compelling benefits.

Agility in rolling out new services
Businesses that opt for a centralized rather than a distributed (e.g., multiple PBXs) model have a definite advantage when it comes to rolling out unified communications solutions. With a traditional distributed model, adding and integrating a unified communications solution, such as Microsoft® Office Communications Server, into your existing voice solution requires you to implement the solution at every IP-PBX across the network — a time-consuming and costly process. With the Avaya Centralized IP Telephony solution, the same unified communications service gets rolled out to all your enterprise users at once — delivering a consistent user experience across your organization. For example, a centralized voice solution enables you to implement unified messaging into your voicemail application one time across the enterprise rather than multiple times at each individual site.

Management made simpler
With Avaya’s solution, the “centralized” in Centralized IP Telephony also applies to network management. As a centralized function, management becomes faster and simpler than a distributed solution. And since personnel are required to learn only one rather than several products to manage the network, this can lead to significant savings in terms of resources and training required.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Avaya Centralized IP Telephony can drive reduced TCO on many fronts, including offering the economies of scale not possible through a traditional dispersed model. For example, new services and capabilities can be implemented quickly and easily using your existing equipment, eliminating the need for further investment. Other ways that Avaya Centralized IP Telephony leads to lower TCO include:

• Bandwidth sharing reduces total trunking requirements
• Elimination of under-utilized TDM trunks at the branches
• Minimized costs associated with PBX upgrades and enhancements
• PSTN trunking consolidation and reduction provides better utilization of access resources

Enhanced productivity through SIP
Avaya Centralized IP Telephony supports the latest standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which not only offers a smooth evolution from older technologies, but also delivers a solution that is future-proofed to grow with your business. SIP trunk services provide additional benefits to a centralized solution through trunk consolidation with local number portability, which enables employees to maintain their local identities.

Elevating customer satisfaction levels
The advantages of Centralized IP Telephony also extend to your customers when they call your contact center. Through advanced capabilities such as centralized Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Avaya enables you to connect customers to automated self-service facilities that can complete many transactions on the spot, eliminating the need to talk to an agent or endure long wait times for service.

Conclusion
Are you ready to reap the benefits of unified communications? Then now is the time to partner with Avaya — the company that has been delivering telephony and data systems to the world’s largest service providers and enterprises for decades, has pioneered the digital revolution and is leading the way in the development of unified communications solutions.

Avaya Centralized IP Telephony highlights
• Reduces the ongoing costs of branches by consolidating legacy nodes onto a centralized communications server
• Enables energy and cost savings through the consolidation of multiple facilities
• Provides investment protection by converting your distributed PBXs into survivable remotes and retaining current handsets
• Reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through data center consolidation, use of a converged network for transport and consolidated PSTN access
• Lowers network costs through economies of scale, bandwidth sharing and the elimination of under-utilized TDM trunks
• Maintains branch identity local number portability via SIP trunk services
• Ensures a consistent user experience through centralized unified messaging at the data center
• Offers business flexibility through centralized control of applications and resources, contact center consolidation and accelerated roll-out of new applications to end users
• Delivers simplicity and cost savings through integrated management and a common GUI across the enterprise
• Eases integration with Microsoft and IBM desktop applications and unified communications environments

A look at unified communications applications
• User experience: Unified experience across phone, mobile and PC through tight integration with desktop applications; presence-enabled personalization and customization; and network-enabled find-me/follow-me

• Collaboration: Multimedia, video and audio conferencing and collaboration, secure instant messaging, application sharing, and file exchange to drive enhanced productivity and faster decision-making

• Customer services: Multimedia collaboration, mobility, productivity and information interactions as the basis for new engaged-customer services and customer contact center operational effectiveness

• Unified communications-enabled applications: Embedding unified communications in applications to accelerate business processes

Key attributes of Avaya Centralized IP Telephony
Consolidation can lead to immense benefits for your organization, including cost savings, lower TCO and greater efficiency, but only if you choose a solution that delivers some key attributes. For example, the solution must offer scalability and capacity capabilities for consolidation and growth. Reliability must be second to none to ensure the delivery of real-time communications such as voice. And finally, to ensure that it’s business as usual regardless of what happens, the solution must offer business continuity and branch survivability.

Key attributes of Avaya Centralized IP Telephony

Attribute	Avaya solution
Scalability	• Maximum number of SIP lines: 250,000 • Maximum number of IP lines: 125,000 • Maximum number of SIP, IP, SS7 trunks: 150,000
Reliability	Carrier-grade and business-grade solutions enabling five-nines plus reliability
Business continuity	Multiple redundant options are available to address varying requirements; for example, geographic survivability, which splits the core across two data centers, enabling transparent call failover capabilities
Branch survivability	Multiple solutions are available, and can be chosen based on the size and importance of the branch designated to provide survivability should data center connections be lost

If you have any queries or would like more information about any of the solutions outlined, please contact us or request a call back. Alternately, you can call us on 905 695 2237 or 877 336 7710 for more immediate help and advice.