Avaya Solutions for IBM Lotus Users

Avaya Unified Communications applications provide advanced mobility and collaboration to end users for increased responsiveness to customers and more efficient decision-making; New Avaya solutions integrate with IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and IBM Lotus Sametime to deliver Avaya IP telephony, conferencing and messaging to the Lotus environment

Avaya today announced significant additions to its suite of Unified Communications solutions at Lotusphere, IBM's annual user conference for Lotus software. The new applications expand Avaya's established portfolio of solutions for the Lotus platform and extend the company's strategy to change how businesses deliver strategic communications and collaboration tools to workers wherever they are, on any network, platform or device. Avaya is a global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.

Avaya Unified Communications solutions for Lotus Sametime, Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino currently include multiple applications, such as unified messaging, speech access to Lotus Notes email messages, calendars, directories and communications functions, and multi-party, click-to conference for Lotus Sametime. The solutions announced today represent integration with the most current versions of Lotus solutions in addition to extending Avaya's voice communications deeper into the Lotus collaborative environment.

"Avaya's Unified Communications strategy focuses on enabling end users to access all their communications capabilities in a coordinated way, from wherever they may be located and from whatever device they may be using," said Eileen Rudden, Avaya vice president and general manager, Unified Communications. "Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime are among the most popular PC applications in use by businesses today. Avaya is happy to work with industry leader IBM to provide Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes users with integrated experiences for office and mobile telephony, voice and video conferencing, and voice messaging. By incorporating these powerful communications capabilities into business applications, Avaya and IBM are helping customers achieve enhanced customer responsiveness and efficient corporate management, the benefits of Intelligent Communications."

Avaya is introducing three Unified Communications solutions, which will be on display at Lotusphere along with other advanced, integrated Avaya IP communications solutions for Lotus Notes and Domino and Lotus Sametime:

Avaya Meeting Exchange for IBM Lotus Sametime extends the value of the latest version of IBM's platform for secure, scalable and proven instant messaging and Web conferencing. By integrating Avaya's market-leading audio conferencing capabilities, the solution provides users with added collaboration capabilities, including multi-party click-to-conference from Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime contact lists. In addition, Avaya Meeting Exchange integrates with the Web conferencing in Lotus Sametime to offer meeting participants a single, unified interface for both audio and web conferencing. Workers can see web and audio presence, including who is speaking, and they can manage audio and web conferencing in real-time - mute noisy lines, disconnect participants or dial out to new participants - making it easier and more cost-effective for businesses to collaborate. The solution is available globally.

Avaya IP Softphone support for IBM Lotus Sametime provides workers with access to advanced enterprise communications capabilities from the familiar Lotus Sametime interface on their PC or laptop. The solution enables users to click-to-call from their Lotus Sametime client and contact list and includes features such as transfer, hold and directory access, which can be easily accessed onscreen. Conferencing for up to 6 parties can be launched with the click of a mouse. The solution will be available globally in February 2007.

Avaya Modular Messaging 3.1 is the newest release of Avaya's highly scalable, standards-based messaging system. The solution can be deployed in either a traditional configuration, with voicemails kept on a separate Avaya messaging application server, or in a unified configuration where Lotus Domino customers can store both email and voicemail messages on their Lotus Domino email server. When used with Avaya one-X Speech, users have hands-free, eyes-free, speaker-independent speech access to email, voice mail and calendar from any phone. In addition, speech access enables workers to place one-on-one or multi-party conference calls by simply telling the system to dial people from the user's Lotus Notes contacts list or co-workers from the corporate LDAP directory. This raises productivity and lowers training costs by allowing users to manage voice communications from their familiar Lotus Notes client or an intuitive speech interface. The solution will be available globally in February 2007 - Avaya.