Avaya announced new virtualization options for Aura last week, extending the UC system beyond the confines of physical hardware appliances. Aura is now available in the VMware-ready OVA format and can run on VMware’s vSphere 5.0 virtualization platform.
Tac Berry, product marketing manager, Collaboration Platforms at Avaya explained to EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet that his company is now testing support for vSphere 5.1which was recently updated by VMware. As to why Avaya is just now providing Aura as VMware appliance, it has to do with virtualization maturity.
“We weren’t sure that the virtualized environment was ready two years ago to handle the scale and performance level that we wanted to support,” Berry said. “VMware has now become a more realistic application platform so we now feel confident we can provide the same performance in the virtual world.”
Berry stressed that Avaya is still offering hardware based Aura appliances as well. He added that Avaya doesn’t expect its sales force to sell virtualization either.
“The people that sales will be calling on, understand virtualization and they understand why the data center is being virtualized,” Berry said. “Virtualization is not what we have to sell, we have to sell Avaya Aura real time communications.”
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Avaya Updates Unified Communications for Virtualization
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
