Unified Communications Services Gains Video Hooks

Avaya is one of the big names in Unified Communications (UC), but no company can do it all alone. They need partners, especially for complex installs like UC.

One Avaya partner is Altura Communication Solutions, which offers managed services and communication enabled solutions and managed services. Altura hopes to up its UC with the addition of high quality video for conferencing. At least that’s the notion behind the company’s deal to carry Avaya's Radvision Scopia video tool.

Radvision, now a healthy 21 years old, is a pioneer in video conferencing and is now owned by Avaya, although the Radvision branding remains. Avaya, as expected, welcomes the news. "Avaya Connect partners like Altura help us achieve our goal of driving consistent, high-quality communications experiences for customers.

By adding Radvision video to their Avaya portfolio of collaboration solutions, Altura expands the reach of their end-to-end UC offerings," remarked  Karl Soderlund, vice president, Amercias Channel Sales "With this portfolio addition, Altura can help businesses develop their existing video collaboration capabilities in new and exciting ways."

UC Trends

Unified Communications, often now offered as a cloud service through companies such as Thinking Phones and Microsoft Lync which is part of Office 365, is not just taking hold, but transforming many of the shops it enters.

Many customers start slow with UC. For some the enterprise grade instant messaging is the initial driver. The next adoption is often presence. Later Web, audio and video conferencing are activated. The ultimate step is ripping out the legacy PBX and either replacing it with and IP PBX, hosted PBX, or pure cloud voice service where the PBX functions are invisible to the end customer.

Hosted voice and UC options also have the advantages that come with the cloud. Voice services can be accesses nearly anywhere and from multiple devices, IP phones, smart phones, softphones on PCs and tablets.