Business Phone System Reviews | SE Telecom

Like many other countries, Canada is looking at some pretty rapid changes when it comes to the telecom field. One of the areas that’s most likely to see some serious changes in 2011 is the area of streaming data that users want to pull down into their tablet or their smartphones.

Here are some ways that mobile access is likely to impact the nation over the next year or so:

• Data plans in Canada are currently among some of the most expensive globally right now. This has created something of a hindrance to users, making some types of mobile data access cost-prohibitive. This is due, in part, to the vast geography of Canada, which makes it much more difficult to deploy the kinds of infrastructure required to make high-speed mobile networks work. That being said, it’s likely that competition in the marketplace from some of the major vendors will cause prices to drop somewhat and come closer to par with the rest of the world.
• The normalization that will occur in terms of bandwidth charges and caps on data should cause a spike in demand. As the cost of high-bandwidth mobile data applications drops, more and more consumers will see an increased appetite for the technology.
• The growing demand will then create some frustration among users as the data providers struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of requested bandwidth. This will require further tweaking of both service and deliver models.
• Vendors will likely tier their data plans to be geared more toward specific uses. For example, Bell just recently began adding an optional data service aimed at premium video services like sports or HBO via a tablet or smartphone. This model charges customers not by the amount of data they use in megabyte, but rather in a temporal way, tracking video usage by the minute.

When it comes to getting online from your national flight, late is probably going to be better than never. As it stands today, Canadians will have access to Wi-Fi signals on national flights sometime in the middle of 2011. The system, which is licensed by SkySurf Canada Communications, was originally scheduled to be released late in 2010 rather than in 2011. Currently, the company has been testing the in-flight connectivity alongside Air Canada in order to get things running the way that they want them to run.

To get this connection going, SkySurf Canada is working with Aircell. That company provides a service called “Gogo” in the U.S., which is an in-flight Wi-Fi service. The Canadian service will use existing cell phone towers to provide the Wi-Fi signals for the airline customers. In order to have the connectivity, the airline will have to fly over top of ground where those towers are located.

The service will, in its initial stages, be offered on a regional basis. It will offer high-density traffic in the route between Quebec City and Windsor, as well as the loop between Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. Once these routes have been fully established and are in use, it’s likely that the service will continue to expand out further to other routes and areas.

The biggest challenge, of course, to getting Wi-Fi service onto flights is the demographic and geographic nature of the country. The largest numbers of the Canadian population live near the U.S. border, and that is then of course where the majority of those cell towers are currently located.

A pilot project recent completed using two aircraft from Air Canada on the Montreal, Toronto and Los Angeles routes. The passengers aboard these flights were able to access data for $10 for the flight via a notebook, or a slightly lower fee of $8 if they’re using a smartphone instead.

The intention of SkySurf is to enter a roaming agreement with Aircell that would allow Canadian passengers to use the SkySurf network, and for passengers in the US to use the Aircell network.

The Avaya Agile Communications Environment (ACE) has been a wonderful add-on to the Avaya portfolio. Part of what Avaya acquired in the process of adding Avaya to the fold, the ACE platform has now been fully integrated with Avaya products, making it one of the most interesting and powerful platforms of it’s type.

While the ACE platform has been highly useful and functional up to this point, the new version of the platform extends the power and potential to new levels. The new version of Avaya ACE has a number of important features, including:

• An add-on for Microsoft Office Communicator clients that will let that software interact with the line of Avaya IP PBX systems. This will save companies money and add functionality. By using this particular add-on, the Avaya customer can avoid purchasing enterprise Communicator licensing, and instead be able to rely on the client-access license model. This will save the organization a significant investment in licensing. When used with Avaya Aura communications server, the add-on becomes even more powerful.
• Support for the latest release of IBM Sametime and Lotus Notes clients. The current version of ACE supports previous releases of the IBM software, and the new ACE will support the latest releases of the IBM products.
• Continued support for other client applications. ACE supports a dozen or so applications that can integrate with Avaya Aura, in addition to the applications noted above.
• The Foundation Toolkit. For many businesses with specialized needs, this may be the most important part of the new Avaya ACE. This toolkit lets customers sequence their own individual applications within ACE to create much more complex and robust types of applications. This would allow users to combine functionality such as recording, transcription, billing and more all within a single interface, and part of the overall communications strategy.

This month, Avaya released a statement via Ajay Kapoor, which is the Vice President for Customer Service at the company. In the release, Kapoor speculates on the top communications trends coming in 2011. Here’s a look at a few of those trends, and some thoughts about how this will affect the industry in general and Avaya customers in particular:

• “Compliance catalyzes collaboration.” While the examples Avaya gives have to do with issues specifically going on in the United States like financial and health care reform, the fact of the matter is that governments are requiring much more in the way of accountability from companies, and communications vendors need to be able to help their customers meet those compliance requirements. Accordingly, collaboration systems that have high reliability and fast performance (which is something Avaya seems to excel at) will be in demand more and more.
• “Consumerizing the enterprise accelerates.” The idea here is that, as more and more people enter the workforce who’ve had technology at their fingertips since the crib, organizations will have to show that they can give the kinds of technological resources that new hires are going to expect to have in order to do their jobs.
• “Social media morphs from add-on to integrated.” Every year, we’re told how important social media is. We’re also told how over-hyped social media is. Maybe we’re getting to the point where we recognize that social media channels are now integral to business processes, rather than ancillary.
• “Virtualization reshapes the desktop-server relationship.” If social media are over-hyped, virtualization probably is as well. What is sure is that the cloud is becoming more and more significant for both consumers and businesses, and so it will be interesting to watch how Avaya and others manage to integrate these kinds of technologies into their portfolios.

Anyone who’s been following Avaya’s activities in Canada this year can tell you this for certain: Avaya is making some serious waves. Starting with the acquisition of Nortel and the development of the Avaya Roadmap in January, the company has made some major strides in the marketplace and has demonstrated its commitment to the Canadian market and economy. In fact, Avaya’s impact was so strong this year that the managing director and president of Avaya Canada, Ross Pellizzari, was named the “#4 newsmaker” by the ITBusiness.ca website.

The impact of the Nortel acquisition can’t be underestimated, in terms of showing the company’s commitment to Canada. It was announced this month that two former Nortel facilities in Ontario would be developed into cutting-edge research facilities to support some of Avaya’s newest and most advanced technologies. In addition, Avaya’s Aura platform has been fully integrated now with the contact centre software from Nortel, making the product a true powerhouse.

In 2010, Avaya also launched Avaya Connect. This is Avaya’s newest global channel partner program. The program features a new line of discounts and incentives that are based, in part, on the competency of the partners. Along with other initiatives, this has led to much stronger (if fewer in number) Avaya partners, helping the company to be competitive in the marketplace.

The annual partner conference in October featured a move toward a “new Avaya.” This new message intends to let customers know that Avaya is offering some of the most cutting edge, intelligent communication and collaboration tools, and that Avaya products like Aura and SIP are changing the communications landscape.  This “unified message” is designed to help customers experience a higher level of service and satisfaction, and Avaya Canada has made dramatic efforts to make sure that their leadership team is able to meet the needs of partners and consumers alike.

Avaya solutions are having an impact all across the globe. From Ontario to Virginia to France and beyond, Avaya technologies are being used by businesses of all sizes to achieve some of the most advanced communications techniques available. Now, Avaya continues to show their position as a global leader by launching one of the Middle East’s first modern emergency 911 call centers.

It was announced this week that a new Avaya-based E911 call center has been launched to cover the Amman, Jordan region. The center was funded by the U.S. Government and is being used to help support the Jordanian economy by providing solid, reliable communications and continuity, and providing for the public safety.

Experts are looking to this system as a prototype for possible new emergency 911 centers elsewhere in the Middle East. This call system is, in many ways, engineered in the same way that similar E911 centers have been launched in the U.S. and Canada.

Jordanian officials chose Avaya, in part, because of their proven track record for delivering such systems that feature 99.999 percent reliability. This system in Amman creates a telephone system that stretches across the capital city, giving the public a quick, reliable way to access emergency services. Just like here, the public need only dial a three digit emergency code (9-1-1) on any phone and they are then connected to dispatchers who can connect them with first responders or other entities that can address the emergency.

Tim Gentry, who is the senior Vice President at Avaya Government Solutions, said of the project, “We are providing Amman with a modern E-911 system that will save lives and enhance public safety for the Jordanian people.”

This center demonstrates not only how reliable Avaya solutions are, but it also reflects the global commitment of the company to provide solutions wherever they are needed.

One of the most useful products to enter the Avaya fold with the acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions is the Agile Communications Environment (ACE) solution. This software solution allows users to embed real-time communications in a variety of formats into their business applications. This helps to make business collaboration more streamlined, speed up workflows and lower overall costs.

The newest release of ACE, version 2.3, has a greater degree of features and functionality than its predecessors, reflecting Avaya’s contribution and reimagining of this highly-functional software. Some of the new features and abilities you’ll find in this release include:

• Better integration with Avaya Aura. This is, for many people, one of the most important features of the new release. The web services and applications available via Avaya Aura are an important part of many business processes, and adding the ACE communication element can only serve to make them stronger.
• Microsoft Communicator client-side add-in. This will allow users to integrate Microsoft Communicator clients via the Avaya desktop phones. This adds click-to-call functionality to many environments, streamlining the communications process. Best of all, this allows organizations to operate under the Microsoft Office Communications Server license, rather than having to purchase client access licenses.
• Embedding for Lotus Notes and Sametime. Click-to-call functionality for Lotus Notes lets users view telephony presence, and integrates with Avaya and other phones.
• Greater IT development control. There is also included a new toolkit to go with Avaya Aura. This gives developers the ability to design their communication sessions in which a variety of actions can trigger when a call takes place. For example, an incoming call to a legal firm might be first identified by caller ID, recorded, sent to a transcriptionist, billed to the client and more. In addition, the latest ACE reduces development time for these kinds of solutions by as much as 80 percent.

Avaya ACE is just one more way that Avaya is continuing to offer more functionality and opportunities to their customers.