Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides Unified Communications, Contact Centers, Data solutions and related services directly and through its Channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world.

Through partnerships, Avaya has teamed up with other leading providers of core switching equipment including Force10 Networks. These convergence of technologies fuse Avaya's market-leading VoIP technology with Force10 high performance switches/routers.

7 Tips for Building the Contact Center of the Future. As consumers rapidly embrace the web and mobile devices for fast answers to questions, is the contact center finally on its way out?

When your website does a poor job of resolving customer service issues, the escalation costs that ensue are truly astounding. Our latest report, based on published data from Forrester Research, gives you an eye opening look into these runaway costs and how you can stop them.

Aberdeen Group’s recent research on Next-Generation Customer Experience Management highlights the recent trend in the customer-company relations and the challenges companies face with their customer experience management (CEM) efforts across multiple channels. The results of this research will be included in this soon-to-be-released whitepaper.

Some of the findings and insights that will be included in the upcoming whitepaper are:

• The primary reasons companies struggle in adopting a data-driven approach to manage their customer interactions
• How companies are adaptating to the new dynamics of the "customer era."
• The performance gains Best-in-Class organizations realize as a result of their ability to convert data into actionable insights

Out-of-band access to distributed IT equipment has been crucial for enterprise customers to eliminate the need for onsite remote IT staff to handle outages. Not only does this save travel costs, but out-of-band access also reduces recovery time in the event of unplanned outages to ensure remote site productivity.

Traditionally, out-of-band access to remote sites during unplanned network outages has been accomplished using analog modem connections. This solution is secure, robust and still widely deployed throughout the world. As technology changes, the overhead for maintaining analog modem banks at a central location has become an issue for IT management. In addition, most modern laptops lack internal modems to allow for IT staff on the road or working from home to connect easily to remote sites. The cost of provisioning analog lines at both host and remote locations has increased in part due to the advent of VOIP technologies. This also creates a paradigm where remote sites rely on core switching to provide VoIP analog line access. These same core switches are the gateway for VoIP analog lines which rules out analog modem connectivity during an outage.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer an array of service offerings to their customers that include: monitoring, management, control, security, and the maintenance of their customer’s network, applications, and operating environments that are located in either hosted, co-location or remote customer sites.

As the customers’ demand for additional and unique industry-specific services, high availability, superior performance, services to geographically distributed networks and multiple remote locations grows, MSPs must be ready to meet the challenges and provide solutions to their customers in a timely, cost-effective manner.

There will be a number of complex challenges for MSPs to deliver these extensive services in such a competitive environment, while simultaneously expanding their current service offerings and positioning them as a complete solution to their customers.

Co-location centers (colos) offer an array of services that include rental of data center facilities, network connectivity, and real-time monitoring and support by specialist staff. Tiered services offer customers varying degrees of control over and responsibility for co-located infrastructure, from hosted-only to fully managed.

Co-location has many benefits in today's business environment, making it a popular choice for customers wanting to reduce operating expenditure by leveraging economies of scale, increase physical security, availability and network performance, and allow their staff to focus on delivering value, rather than the logistics and means of delivery.

Service providers are faced with a need to reinvent themselves to capture new opportunities in this era of mobile data. One prospect for the service providers is to address their subscribers demand for more personalized services. Other promising opportunities lie in business services and the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) requirements. To capture these emerging opportunities service providers will need to deploy a next-generation Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) that is easy-to-use, flexible, scalable and offers high performance even for highly complex use cases.

As mobile network infrastructures evolve from time division multiplexing (TDM) to IP, and with the shift in radio technology from 2G/3G to LTE and beyond, the ability to extend IP/MPLS networking out to the furthest reaches of the mobile backhaul network delivers real operational value. In locations where fiber is unavailable or not economic to deploy, microwave access is a well-proven and commonly deployed alternative. As it becomes increasingly common to deploy both IP routing and microwave access to locations within the backhaul network, a need for truly integrated IP/MPLS and microwave equipment has emerged.

WebRTC has been the biggest topic of conversation in the telecommunications industry for a couple of years now. Not surprisingly everyone is trying to figure out what it means to them and where it can be used to improve user experiences and extend the use of the value creation capabilities that exist in todays Service Networks. This paper offers a perspective on how WebRTC will evolve to interwork with and extend Service Networks today.